Thus Passes the Glory of the World
by LooseHeadRugger
Summary: The sidewalks glistened as the early morning sun shown almost mockingly against the large, bold-faced headlines scattered up and down every driveway in America; "14 Left Dead as Tragedy Rocks Small Town." Ensemble Fic.
1. Prologue

**Hey guys, so as some as you might know, this is a re-post of a story I put up a little while ago and then lost because I'm a moron. But anyway, I was working on another story and recently finished it so I decided to go for take two with this one. So for all of those that were reading this story the first time around, please bare with me for the first couple of chapters that I had posted up here once before!**

**So anyway, I know that these stories have been done a million times before but I started writing it and I was having a good time doing it so I figured I'd throw my own attempt into the mix.**

**So just a couple of notes to throw in, this story takes place right after season 1, mainly because I haven't watched season 2 yet. Also, this is an ensemble fic, I just put it up under Finn and Rachel for the sake of putting it up under a character, but for all of those interested in pairings, they basically follow normal ships: Rachel/Finn, Puck/Quinn, a little bit of Will/Shelby but mostly Will/Emma, Artie/Tina, Santana/Brittney, Burt/Carole, the whole nine yards. And of course it also features Kurt, Mercedes, Mike, Matt Sue, and basically any other main character you can think of from season 1 anyway.  
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**Also, just one last fair warning, this story is rated M for violence and (a lot of) main character death so don't say I didn't warn you!**

**Last but not least, hope you enjoy, and thanks for reading!**

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><p><strong>Prologue<strong>

**Friday, June 4****th****, 2010**

**(Morning)**

Before Friday, June 4th, 2010, the first thought to enter most people's minds upon being asked about William McKinley was – "Who the hell is William McKinley?"

Some would be able to accurately identify him as the 25th president of the United States of America.

A handful of others might be able to tell you that William McKinley is the man whose face adorned the rarely seen $500 bill.

A small percentage of true history buffs could probably even let you know that William McKinley was the final United States Civil War veteran ever to be inaugurated into presidency, and that he would push his common identity as local war hero to lead his country to victory in the shortest war ever to be declared in its history; the Spanish-American War.

Yes, for most people, before Friday, June 4th, 2010, William McKinley had been nothing more than a name, very much like how a columbine had simply been an average state's representative flower, and Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University was merely another top-twenty public college.

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><p>The sun had risen with a noble duress over the small town of Lima, Ohio, introducing the early Friday air as meteorologists danced animatedly across their television screens, accurately predicting a high temperature of 85° without a single cloud in sight for miles to hinder it and residents, anxious in their anticipation, prepared themselves for the reminder of the rapidly approaching summer holiday.<p>

Meanwhile, inside of an overly crowded, publically funded high school, a group of burnt out, exhausted teachers began counting down the days until their much needed summer vacation while their bored, despondent students eagerly began counting down the minutes until their coveted lunch break.

And inside of an overly crowded, publically funded high school parking lot, two rogue, vengeful teenagers eagerly began counting down the seconds until their plotted retribution, because unlike their clueless peers, they knew that reality could never be as clear, or as simple as waking up on a fresh spring morning may imply.

It was on the morning of Friday, June 4th, 2010, as the sun beat heavily downwards across the small town of Lima Ohio, emphasizing the accurately predicted temperature of 85° without a single cloud in sight for miles to hinder it that two students stepped out onto the blacktop of their student parking lot towards their little known high school, named after a little known president located in their little known town…

And it was on the evening of that very same day, as the sun sank behind a grieving town bearing a dramatic low of 48°, with clouds sweeping inwards for miles, rendering the marvels of the night sky invisible, that the name William McKinley had found itself transformed from the image of a mere man, to that of an unspeakable act of terror.


	2. Jacob & Suzy

**Chapter 1  
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**Life (And Everything It Has Ever Done to Me)**

(Jacob and Suzy)

Friday, June 4th, 2010: Morning

People didn't like Jacob Ben-Israel.

Perhaps it was the over-sized glasses, or maybe it was the frizzled hair or the gap in between his two front teeth that emitted a soft whistling noise every time he spoke, but whatever it was, people just didn't like Jacob Ben-Israel.

They didn't even have the courtesy to remember his name.

Throughout elementary school, he was simply known as the boy who ate bugs during recess. In middle school, he was that freak that still came to class on Halloween dressed up like a Power Ranger, and by the time he'd reached high school, he was merely identified as being that creepy stalker kid whose only friend was his computer.

That was why on a picturesque morning in early June, Jacob Ben-Israel could be found sitting in the passenger's seat of his maroon colored 1992 Honda Accord, balancing a Sauer 38H pistol in one hand and a Tech-9 semiautomatic handgun in the other as he struggled to maneuver his pinkies to type his final message to the world alongside the sticky keys of his worn down keyboard.

And with year's worth of pain embedded into his mind, and a lifetime of revenge deep in his heart, Jacob Ben-Israel straightened his back and turned towards his left in order to address the one person that was ever able to remember his name…

"Are you ready?"

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><p>People didn't like Suzy Pepper.<p>

Perhaps it was the over-sized glasses, or maybe it was the frizzled hair or the flat feet that forced her to walk down the hallways of William McKinley High School with a slight waddle and a hunch that eventually gave her scoliosis, but whatever it was, people just didn't like Suzy Pepper.

They didn't even have the courtesy to remember her name.

Throughout elementary school, she was simply known as the girl who peed in her pants during the second grade class picture. In middle school, she was that freak that still came to class listening to Maureen McGovern cassette tapes while all of the Junior Cheerios listened to the latest hit singles on their latest iPods, and by the time she'd reached high school, she was merely identified as being that creepy stalker kid whose only friend was her computer.

That was why on a picturesque morning in early June, Suzy Pepper could be found sitting in the driver's seat of her friend's maroon colored 1992 Honda Accord, balancing a 12 gauge Remington 1100 Tactical shotgun in one hand and its remaining ammunition in the other as she struggled to maneuver her pinkies to finish duct taping the last of the shrapnel onto her collection of pipe bombs.

And with year's worth of confusion embedded into her mind and a lifetime of uncertainty deep in her heart, Suzy Pepper straightened her back and turned towards her right in order to address the one person that was ever able to remember her name.

"Yeah, I'm ready."

"Good," He breathed, and with an abrupt force, his hands gripped at the head of his pistol, shifting the slide backwards towards him, effectively loading the magazine into its clip with a click that echoed the finality of his intentions, emphasized only by the forceful pressing of a computer's enter key so that in an instant, every last one of Jacob Ben-Israel's countless websites, blogs, message boards and profiles lit up with his cryptic last rites:

_Re-evaluate your heroes. This was never my fault._

"Then let's get this shit done."

A simultaneous intake of air diffused between two partners.

And with synchronized motions, two students stepped out from beneath the cover of their vehicle, and the veil cast before them by years of merciless torture, and approached their high school with a swift focus and rapt determination in their own effort to ensure that nobody would ever forget their names again.

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><p>Brian Saralli was born on June 4th, 1995 at 6:03 a.m.<p>

His family had moved both him and his two younger brothers to Lima, Ohio the summer before he was slated to begin the seventh grade, where he had decided to join the local football team in an effort to make some more friends in a new town…

In the eighth grade, he'd become the top prospect of the upcoming William McKinley High School football team.

And by the time he'd entered his freshman year, he had been awarded the coveted position of starting quarterback on the Freshman Titan's Squad, bypassing his peers easily with all of the students, teachers, and parents alike loudly whispering about how he was destined to become the next Finn Hudson.

Yes, Brian Saralli was destined for greatness beginning at a young age, but for his fifteenth birthday, he only wanted one thing; to spend it with his girlfriend.

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><p>Leah Monahan was born on June 4th, 1995 at 6:03 p.m.<p>

Her family had moved both her and her two younger sisters to Lima, Ohio the summer before she was slated to begin the seventh grade, where she had decided to join the local dance team in an effort to make some more friends in a new town…

In the eighth grade, she'd become the top prospect of the upcoming William McKinley High School Dance Troupe.

And by the time she'd entered her freshman year, she had been awarded the coveted position of lead dancer on the Freshman Cheerio's Squad, bypassing her peers easily with all of the students, teachers, and parents alike loudly whispering about how she was destined to become the next Quinn Fabray.

Yes, Leah Monahan was destined for greatness beginning at a young age, but for her fifteenth birthday, she only wanted one thing; to spend it with her boyfriend.

That was why on the morning of Friday, June 4th, 2010 William McKinley High School's most admired freshman couple could be found sneaking quietly from the main double doors of the west side entrance, hands enclosed, mischievous smiles imprinted permanently across both of their faces…

Minutes behind the official start of William McKinley's designated lunch break, a head start had been something that they had planned on all along; a conscious effort not to cross paths with anybody who could potentially deter their off-campus lunch date which, technically speaking was an unlawful action for underclassmen…

Pressing forwards, they had carried out their plan with an expectation not to run into a single soul.

Especially not Suzy Pepper and Jacob Ben-Israel…

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><p>Brian Saralli had lost count of just how many times him and his football buddies had tossed Jacob Ben-Israel into the school's back dumpsters, but if there was one thing that he knew for certain, it was that it never got old.<p>

"Hey Israel buddy, how's it going?' He approached the brooding teenager with a confident gait and a mock sense of interest, oblivious towards the anger behind his peer's eyes as he wrapped his arm across the shoulders of his self-proclaimed punching bag, tugging him without hesitation towards the general direction of the back dumpsters.

"Brian come on, just leave the kid alone."

Leah Monahan had lost count of just how many times she'd watched her boyfriend and his football buddies toss Jacob Ben-Israel into the school's back dumpsters, but if there was one thing that she knew for certain, it was that it was starting to get old.

"Hang on babe. This will only take a second." He informed her with a sneer before he turned his attention back towards his much shorter, red-headed counterpart. "I heard that yesterday was tuna casserole day in the cafeteria Israel. If you find any in there make sure to save some for later… Tuna casserole is kosher, right?"

Jacob Ben-Israel had lost count of just how many times Brian Saralli and his football buddies had tossed him into the school's back dumpsters, but if there was one thing that he knew for certain, it was that it was never going to happen again.

They say that when a human being loses any one of their five crucial senses, the remaining four only get stronger, and in a way, Jacob Ben-Israel knew that this was true, because in a way, it had happened to him…

But Jacob had not parted with his flimsy sense of sight or sound, touch, taste or even smell, no… Instead, on the day that Jacob Ben-Israel had lost a different kind of sense – his sense of dignity – so many years ago now, it seemed, he realized that when all of his classmates would stare at him, or point in the halls, he could always catch it, from every direction; even with his less than acute 20/200 vision… When they would throw quick slurs towards him, like freak, and loser, and fag, and kike, he always heard it, even the quietest of whispers. When they would throw him inside of a school dumpster, shove him rudely inside of his own locker, or dip his plethora of red curls down the men's room toilet bowls and flush, he felt it every single time in the form of a sharp pain ringing deep within the center of his chest…

And every night, when he would retreat back home into the safety of his bedroom, embracing the sound-proofed privacy that the attic space offered to him, he sobbed desperately into his pillow so that he could hear every gut wrenching cry, taste every bitter tear drop, sharp on his tongue…

"You're awfully quiet today, Israel." Brian commented on the unusual passivity of his counterpart, the ease by which Jacob was complying with him by. "What's the matter, have you finally realized that trying to get away is completely…"

His sentence was halted abruptly; forever silenced, forever unfinished.

Along an empty football field at the edge of the campus boundaries, a flock of geese took flight in their natural response towards such a sudden explosion of noise.

Across the packed classrooms, groups of half-listening students and their equally half-teaching teachers briefly acknowledged an unusual break in the silence before simply dismissing it all together.

And within a small quad decorating the double doors of William McKinley High School's west side entrance, a young cheerleader fled, buckling only steps into her escape underneath the pressure of a single Remington 1100 Tactical Shotgun Shell as it lodged itself deep within the pit of her spine while meanwhile, right beside her, a mere boy with so many unfinished prospects and a shattered future took a bullet directly between two piercing blue eyes, crumpling motionless onto the ground below without so much as a stagger.

Dead before he'd even known what had hit him.


	3. Rachel Berry

**Hey guys, so here's the next chapter, real quick I just wanted to give a big shout out and thank you to everybody who read, reviewed, alerted, did whatever it was that you did. So thanks, it means the world, really! Anyway, hope you enjoy this chapter, I'll try to get the next one up as quick as I can.  
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><p><strong>Chapter 2<strong>

**In Between the White Lines**

(Rachel Berry)

Every Friday during third period, in that last grueling hour before William McKinley High School finally dismissed their students to embark on their cherished lunch break, Rachel Berry had a free period block scheduled into her otherwise hectic repertoire of school work.

And even though your average, every day student at William McKinley High School would have openly embraced the first opportunity that they had to tack an extra fifty seven minutes onto their lunch, your average, every day student at William McKinley High School also would have already known that Rachel Berry was a lot of things, but your average, every day student at William McKinley High School was not one of them.

It didn't take the aspiring young star very long to discover that for one blissful hour between 9:55 a.m. and 10:46 a.m., the normally over-crowded auditorium, primarily packed with mediocre choir students and burnt out musical wannabe's was completely, and utterly empty.

And contraire to popular belief, Rachel Berry loved an empty auditorium almost as much as she enjoyed a full one.

Inside of an empty auditorium, Rachel became brand new. Inside of an empty auditorium, she could assume the shape of anybody, dream to be any person that she wished to become.

Inside of an empty auditorium for a brief hour every Friday morning, Rachel Berry became God.

She stood within the stage's vast center, glowing underneath the brightest spotlight, embracing the change as she transformed from Rachel Berry, William McKinley High School sophomore, long-term resident of Lima, Ohio, the girl that nobody talked to, the kid that had learned to bring an extra pair of clothes to school every day just in case the first had been destroyed by an unexpected slushee attack into Rachel Barbra Berry, New York City's rising breakout Broadway star, the girl who everybody talked about, the kid who everybody knew was going to make it big one day…

Closing her eyes, she contracted her stomach muscles harshly against her diaphragm, pushing her voice upwards towards its absolute threshold and beyond in an effort to reach that coveted high F as she raised her arms high above her head, her perfectly tuned ears poised as the noise of her own voice bounced off of the auditorium and straight back to her…

"I thought I would find you here."

Rachel's eyes snapped abruptly open, the haze of her dream state fading almost as quickly as it had appeared as a distantly familiar voice rang through her ears from somewhere within the back of the auditorium.

The girl's head snapped quickly sideways, her arms lowering and her face relaxing into a deep set frown as her eyes focused on the form of none other than her own mother; you know, the mother that she hadn't seen, hadn't even heard from since that fateful day well over a week ago now; that day where Shelby Corcoran had single handedly managed to take every single dream that her daughter had ever had and literally stomp all over them, forcing her to watch as the woman coached somebody else's children and celebrated the victory that she knew should have belonged to her while simultaneously ignoring her own aching flesh and blood standing mere feet away.

"What are you doing here?" A hint of malice glistened off of the edge of Rachel's tongue, but although Rachel truly had believed that her getting snippy with Shelby would have made her feel at least a little bit better, it hadn't; in fact, it didn't even come close.

Shelby didn't respond to her hostility immediately. Instead, she took her time, sauntering towards the piano and perching herself upon the cushioned bench before slowly crossing her right leg over the left; a strategic motion designed to silently inform Rachel that she was willing to stay as long as was necessary.

"I don't have class until noon, and I happen to know that you have a free period right now."

"That's kind of creepy." Rachel informed her, standing her ground firmly, keeping her guard elevated in preparation for the strong likelihood that the only reason that her mother had come to visit her here today was to continue to beat the dead horse by emphasizing her desire to have absolutely nothing to do with her.

"Get used to it, I am your mother."

Rachel couldn't help the slight scoff that escaped from her throat in response to the comment as she crossed her arms tightly across her chest… It was nice to know that Shelby was willing to consider herself her mother only when it was convenient for her to do so.

"I just wanted to talk to you." Shelby spoke again; her tone softening with the recognition of the fact that Rachel hadn't been particularly receptive to what she'd believed to be a well placed joke.

"About what?"

"I don't know," She offered the younger girl before her the slightest of shrugs, "Life." Her words achieved nothing more than the production of an elicit response from Rachel who immediately raised two suspicious eyebrows towards the woman's general direction…

She just couldn't help but wonder why Shelby had suddenly become so interested.

"Listen," Shelby sighed, a desperate firmness behind her voice, "I just wanted to make sure that you were alright."

"I'm fine," Rachel lied, speaking just a little bit too quickly to be completely convincing.

"Good," Shelby nodded absently, drifting off only briefly before snapping to attention once again. "You were amazing at Regionals you know…" She shifted the topic of conversation, watching as before her, Rachel stared defiantly forward, struggling to maintain her stone cold glare amidst the tears stinging at the back of her eyes in response to the mere memory of that day; the day that she would rather forget more than any other in her entire life. "I was proud of you, Rachel… really, I was."

The younger girl finally forced herself to tear her gaze from that of her mother's, afraid that if she held onto it for even a fraction of a second longer, she would no longer be able to contain her threatening tears.

Suddenly, she was struggling to so much as inhale; her chest seemed impossibly tight as she attempted several coordinated, deep breaths, just trying to focus on her expanding lungs…

Breathe in, and breathe out… breathe in, breathe out.

In the back of her throat, a subconscious sniffle involuntarily escaped from between her slightly parted lips, the only noise that she could manage in response to the phrase that she had been waiting to hear for her entire life… her mother telling her that she was proud of her…

"How's Beth?" Rachel forced herself to change the subject, worried that had she found herself getting sucked too deeply downward into this bog of maternal praise, she would only be let down once again by this woman before her.

"She's doing well… getting big already." Shelby accepted Rachel's tactic of avoidance towards her compliment for what it was, playing along despite her desperate effort to regain some of the trust that she had since lost with the girl, "She's staying over at her grandmother's right now… your grandmother too, I guess that would technically make her."

"I… I have a grandmother?" Rachel slipped before she could stop herself, feeling her guard drop and diminish in an instant, but she didn't care… something else had come in to overpower both her, as well as that damn filter in her brain, unsuccessfully distinguishing between the things that she should be saying versus the things that she shouldn't be.

The thing was Rachel Berry had never had a grandmother before.

"Of course you do." Shelby spoke with a nod and the smallest of laughs as she pushed herself upwards and off of the safety of the piano bench she had previously been sitting upon, finally risking taking several steps closer towards Rachel, "Marie, her name is… and you know, you remind me a lot of her… you have her eyes."

Rachel knew that it was wrong for her to be allowing herself to get sucked in like this so easily… She knew that she was probably doing nothing more beyond setting herself up for disappointment once again.

But still, she craved the answers to the questions that had plagued her maternal family tree for nearly two decades now, and now that she had finally began putting all the pieces together; well she wasn't so sure that she could stop.

And of course, at this point, she wanted Shelby to keep on talking almost as much as she wanted her to just shut the hell up already.

"Do you have any other family?" She watched carefully as she noticed her mother's features contort in their struggle to retain a sense of neutrality despite her overwhelming desire to smile towards the yearning behind her child's eyes.

"I have a sister," She finally nodded, "Sandra… she's two years younger than me but about two million years smarter."

"Do they know about me?" Rachel dropped her eyes to the floor, feeling a sudden and overwhelming sense of guilt towards her curiosity, nervous that she may have overstepped her boundaries in asking such a question… But whether or not Shelby reciprocated in Rachel's hesitancy would forever remain a mystery, because her mother's eyes remained neutral as she offered Rachel a curt nod overshadowed by her response.

"They do."

Eyes slanting slightly upwards once again, she surged with a sudden sense of pride towards the fact that her mother at least cared for her enough to acknowledge her mere existence towards the people who mattered the most to her.

"They know that when I got out of college I applied to be a surrogate to a lovely, respectful couple. They know that in December of that year I gave birth to a beautiful baby girl, and they know that by that point I had already signed the contract stating that legally, I wasn't allowed to make contact with you until your 18th birthday… My mother was so upset with me after she'd learned that part of the deal… she didn't speak to me for months…" Shelby relayed her brief story, her face dancing with a shimmer of pain. "I think that my mother might just be the only other person in this entire world who wanted to meet you just as much as I did; and after… well after she found out that I wouldn't be able to have any more children, well I think that desire just increased tenfold."

Rachel could practically feel her heart swelling painfully inside of her chest… somewhere out there; there was a woman who loved her, who yearned for her presence and she didn't even know who she was…

"The only thing that they don't know is that I had begun looking for you late last year… that I found you." She trailed off in her explanation, watching as Rachel slowly began biting her tongue against the overwhelming whirlwind of questions, spinning circles inside of her mind in their desire to be released… There was just so many of them and so little time to address them all.

After all, Rachel and Shelby did have sixteen years to catch up on.

"So… Beth is doing well, I'm guessing…" Rachel extended her slim arm upwards; quickly swiping a single finger underneath her right eyelid before Shelby could spot the lone tear that she had allowed to escape, cleverly extending upon the initial topic of conversation before she could allow things to get too out of control.

"Oh yeah," Shelby assured her with a confident nod, "She keeps me up all night crying, she's already a little diva… Plus, she's got a pretty good set of lungs on her… she takes after her sister with that one…"

As Shelby had previously expected, her statement registered an instantaneous response from Rachel, whose head had snapped upwards so quickly that her neck cracked loud enough for the older woman to hear it from her position all the way across the stage.

"Me?" She asked, pointing a skeptical finger deep inside of her own chest, half expecting Shelby to tell her no, of course she hadn't been talking about her, and in fact, that she was stupid for so much as thinking that to be the case.

"Of course you," Shelby reinforced, nodding her head firmly against Rachel's hesitancy towards believing her, "Who else would I be talking about?"

For a moment, Rachel considered her mother's question before finally settling with a shrug of her shoulders as she turned her back away from her mother… This all just seemed very unnatural to her, this sudden bombardment of maternal support on account of the fact that apart from her fathers, Rachel Berry had never really had a true family before…

It wasn't exactly a secret amidst her community that Rachel was the absolute pride and joy of her two gay dads… Her dad, Leroy was the only child of a cocaine addict and a deadbeat, and had quickly established himself as a lawyer strictly out of the sake of principle, leaving the family that he had never truly known far behind in his wake.

Meanwhile, her daddy Leroy had had a loving set of parents whose main fault rested in the fact that they had spent a lifetime longing for a daughter, refusing to stop trying until they were up to their necks with five boys and an eventual uterine cancer diagnosis managed to kill any hopes they had had for a girl while simultaneously killing any hopes of Rachel ever knowing her grandmother as well…

Yes, Rachel Berry had grown up the only girl in a strikingly male-populated family, which was exactly the reason why she couldn't help but allow the ghost of a smile to sneak from behind soft features as she acknowledged the fact that she had just managed to gain a mother, a grandmother, an aunt, and a sister all within a matter of minutes.

"I guess… I guess I just, I don't know… I thought that after you adopted Beth, that now that you had a baby that… that maybe you just figured that you wouldn't need me anymore." Rachel spoke, her cheeks glowing with embarrassment as the small smirk that had lit up her face mere moments ago disappeared.

"Rachel…" From beneath her veil of shame, she listened to her mother start what could have been a comprehensible sentence had she found the means by which to finish it. "I know that things have been… strange." Shelby started slowly, picking her words carefully as she progressed forward, "But you have to know that you will always be my first daughter… my only biological daughter really, if you want to start getting technical about things."

Rachel smirked upwards towards the comment, sneaking a sheepish glance towards Shelby in the acknowledgment of the fact that the older woman had just openly recognized her as her daughter for the first time.

"I'm always going to care about you Rachel."Shelby assured her, the smile behind her voice fading into a serious undertone. "So listen, the real reason that I came down here to talk to you today was that… well, I've been thinking about this for the past couple of days now, and… well, I would be honored Rachel, if you would be Beth's godmother."

For what seemed like the millionth time in the past minute alone, Rachel's glassy, doe-like eyes widened large within their sockets as her mouth dropped open in her shock.

Whatever she had been expecting Shelby to say, it had not been that.

"Really?"

"Really… I'm willing to bet the world that you would make an amazing godmother… and an amazing big sister too."

"I think that I would like that." Rachel nodded simply, a smile slowly formulating across the distance of her face resulting in the room glowing brighter than any stage light could ever make it, allowing it to linger only briefly before her expression crunched into a look of deep thought in response to her mind racing with the incessant, immediate ideas on how to go about her newly appointed role.

"I'm guessing that you've already presented Beth with the basics. Of course, there are your three B's; Bach, Beethoven and Brahms… but you can't forget to expand beyond that; Vivaldi, Handle, Mozart, Tchaikovsky… Of course, she might still have a couple of months left in her before she can truly start appreciating the classics, so I recommend a healthy dose of Phantom of the Opera combined with some Les Mis to start with… oh, and in order to extend a full appreciation of Sondheim in the future, I think that Into the Woods would be your best starting point and then you can just move up from there… Now, I entered my first singing competition at three months, but I believe that with the proper motivation, she'll be okay to wait another month or two, and then…"

"Rachel!" Shelby stopped the girl dead in her tracks, probably out of fear that the girl's head would positively pop off from all of the excitement had she allowed her to keep going.

The younger girl silenced instantly, wide-eyed and blue in the face; a direct result of her refusal to so much as breathe in between the words that she had just spewed out of her mouth at a mile a minute.

"How about we talk about his over dinner… maybe tonight?" Shelby offered, watching as Rachel nodded her head up and down in her acceptance of Shelby's offer.

"Okay," She complied, "It would give me enough time to complete my proposal on the appropriate activities that I think that we should enroll Beth in anyway. Plus, I might be able to come up with a suitable timeline of events… I can probably make it up to the age of five or six by tonight if I started right away…"

"That sounds perfect." Shelby nodded towards her, not even bothering to waste her breath by informing the girl that none of that would actually be necessary. She would humor her – for now, that is. "I'll pick you up?"

"I get out of dance at 6:00." Rachel informed her, her head bobbling up and down dramatically upon her thin neck.

"Then I'll see you at seven." Shelby compromised, "How does that sound?"

"It sounds good."Rachel nodded towards her as her words were swallowed behind the shrill ringing of loud bell indicative of the end of the class period, and subsequently, Rachel's free time… Instinctively, she looked downwards towards her left wrist directly at her watch; 10:46 a.m.

"Well, I gotta go… I scheduled a meeting for the glee club at lunch." Rachel explained quickly, packing her binder full of dutifully prepared sheet music back into her backpack. "We have to start scheduling summer rehearsal in order to make sure that we're fully prepared for when Regionals come around next year because I have every intention on absolutely creaming Vocal Adrenaline."

"Well I'm looking forward to cheering you on from the audience." Shelby voiced her approval towards the idea of the defeat of her former glee club, watching as Rachel flung her bag over her shoulders.

There was a brief moment in which the girl paused, closing her eyes temporarily in her hesitation as her mind scrambled, completely unsure as to what exactly it was that her next move should be.

It was several more long, tense seconds later that Rachel's muscles finally decided to act spontaneously on their own accord, pushing her body in closer towards her mother's where, before she'd even known what she was doing, she had her arms wrapped around Shelby's neck and her head buried deep into her hair as she closed her eyes and inhaled slowly, just taking in the potent scent of her perfume.

Underneath her arms, she felt Shelby tense momentarily underneath the sheer unexpectedness of Rachel's sudden attack, and for a split second, Rachel panicked, terrified that she had made the wrong move, subsequently screwing up all of the progress that her and her mother had just made to begin with, but finally, Shelby relaxed into the embrace, reaching up and pressing her hands firmly against Rachel's back as she shifted her body so that her daughter's head slid perfectly into the crook between Shelby's shoulder and her neck.

Together, their bodies fit together like the pieces of a puzzle, so perfect that they were literally forced to pry themselves apart from each other, afraid that if they didn't, they would simply just hold onto that position for the rest of their lives.

"Go ahead," Shelby's fingers slid painfully from her daughter's shoulders, nodding her out of the auditorium, "You don't want to be late for your own meeting."

Rachel smirked upwards towards her mother, her eyes lingering on the ones so identical to her own for one last split second before she turned, racing down the stage steps and reaching halfway up the aisle before stopping, mid stride to twist in a slow 180° circle so that she could turn to face Shelby once again.

"Thanks," She spoke softly, a tone of genuineness lingering behind her voice, "For everything, I mean…"

"You're very welcome," Shelby responded alongside a firm nod, "Now go." Motioning with her hands, she shooed the younger girl outward, watching as she followed her mother's direction with a strict obedience, scurrying the remainder of the length up the aisle and into the hall, pleased with the manner by which this day had been progressing forwards so far, and eager to see what was to later come of it.

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><p>Early on a Saturday morning in a small town in northwestern Ohio, long before the boys riding their bikes threw their rolled up newspapers in front of every driveway in town, littering the sidewalks with the yearbook photos of fourteen smiling ghosts silhouetted behind the words "Unspeakable Tragedy," before all of the over-achieving early morning joggers shut off their alarms and simply decided to sleep in that morning, and before fourteen lifeless bodies were removed from the broken shell of their old high school, veiled by the cover of vacuum-sealed plastic black bags, a woman sat, wide awake and stiff straight at her desk, nothing but the faint glow of a miniature lamp at her side to guide her motions as she entered a new day with a feeling of emptiness, jumping as her cell phone rang at her side; the call that would tell her whether or not her child had survived the night.<p>

But even before that; early on a Friday morning in a small town in northwestern Ohio, long before the boys riding their bikes threw their rolled up newspapers in front of every driveway in town, littering the sidewalks with the yearbook photos of fourteen beaming seniors silhouetted behind the words "Destined for Greatness: William McKinley's Senior Class Prepares for Graduation," before all of the over-achieving early morning joggers rose to beat the hot summer's sun as they lapped the brand new, two million dollar track circling William McKinley High School's football field, and before either Jacob Ben-Israel or Suzy Pepper ever loaded a single bullet into a single gun, a teenager sat, wide awake and stiff straight at her desk, nothing but the faint glow of a miniature lamp at her side to guide her motions as she entered a new day with a feeling of hopeful promise, jumping as her cell phone rang at her side; the alarm signaling for her to get up and start a new day… even though she had already been awake for hours.

Rachel Berry had always been known for her motivation, but it was only after Regionals that it had exploded into proportions beyond that which even she had ever experienced... She wasn't about to waste any more opportunities to prove to the world just how good that she… that _they_ could really be.

But as the sun rose, peaking gently through the spaces between the blinds, shimmering brightly against her windows, not even Rachel Berry could have imagined the extent of what that day would have in store for them all…

It would have been impossible for her to have guessed that by 10:00, she would have made peace with the woman that she had been struggling to call her mother for the past month, that by 10:15, she would feel as if she had finally located somewhere which she belonged. She would have called you crazy if you'd said that by 10:30, she would have acquired a grandmother as well as an aunt for the first time in her entire life, or that once 10:45 rolled around, she would not only have a beautiful baby sister, but a loving goddaughter as well.

Yes, as Rachel Berry rang in the rising sun introducing the warm, bright morning of Friday, June 4th, 2010, she had already been expecting a day filled with unprecedented surprises, but not even she could have expected just what those surprised were that awaited not only her, but the rest of Lima, Ohio as well…

For example, she hadn't been expecting to be hustling busily through the overcrowded hallways of William McKinley High School at approximately 10:46 a.m., cursing herself for her tardiness towards the glee club meeting that she herself had scheduled a day in advance in her effort to lay the blueprint for an entire year's worth of rehearsals that she had already spent countless sleepless nights preparing for…

But like it or not, there she was, glaring intently at the rows of clocks hanging above the heads of a hundred rushing students as they flipped simultaneously from 10:46 to 10:47, with her still no closer to her destination than she had been the moment she'd left the auditorium.

Powering angrily down the hallway, she began pushing her miniscule frame through the crowds, following the tide as the mass shoved her forwards just as 10:47 became 10:48.

It was only when a glistening 10:49 shined across her eyes that Rachel Berry had finally decided to roll up her sleeves and broaden her shoulders in her preparation to resort to physical violence in her effort to get to where she needed to be, because Rachel Berry was a woman on a mission; and once she got a plan firmly affixed in the back of her head, there was nothing in front of her that could get into her way.

Jutting her elbows out sideways, she began to jab at the ribs of every sorry sucker that crossed her overly-determined, overly-motivated path, but just as suddenly as she had started, she was once again forced to a stop.

It was 10:50 a.m. on the morning of Friday, June 4th, 2010 when Rachel Berry's thoughts finally strayed from the idea of her hopes, her dreams, and her glee club…

It was 10:50 a.m. on the morning of Friday, June 4th 2010 when the first of a series of elongated, overwhelmingly loud echoes filled her eardrums with an uncomfortable throbbing and a loud buzz that rang across her head, lingering even long after the mysterious sound dissipated into the wind.

It was 10:50 a.m. on the morning of Friday, June 4th, 2010 that Rachel Berry's small body flinched involuntarily, reeling underneath the pressure of the unexpected explosion.

Her well-trained ears remained firmly poised, extending in its anticipation of hearing the noise again, but her thoughts didn't linger on this possibility; she'd already had a basic idea of the noise's source, and at the time, she'd believed this basic idea to be a very good one.

The senior class at William McKinley High School had a very affluent annual tradition; a competition – if you will – amongst the students stating that whoever could plan and carry out the cleverest senior prank before the last day of the calendar school year would be rewarded with the hard liquor of his or her choice at the grade's most anticipated graduation party of the summer…

And now that the school year was rapidly beginning to dwindle downwards, leaving the time frame of competition diminishing alongside it, students had begun scrambling, desperate to earn the title that they believed themselves to be awarded.

Bizarre, Neanderthal-like antics such as this had been commonplace within William McKinley's narrow walls for the past week or so now, and although Rachel frowned upon such ridiculous displays of immaturity, she opted to remain constantly aware on account of the fact that from her low-lying rung at the bottom of the social ladder, the brunt of all pranks were more often than not directed towards her, and she wanted to be ready for them for when they were.

Sighing heavily, she shook her head in her disappointment as the noise erupted once more from the adjacent hallway, closer the second time, but fading quicker into an eerie silence that lingered for several seconds in which you could positively hear a pin dropping against the crowded hall floors before it was broken by a single, shrill scream which had caught Rachel's attention instantly, mainly due to the fact that it had been off pitch.

It was 10:52 a.m. on the morning of Friday, June 4th, 2010 when it had happened again, but this time had been different; this time, Rachel felt herself stiffening, her senses overloading with the sounds of strangled screams and pounding footsteps as a thousand scattering teenagers stampeded back the way they had just come, the nearing, mysterious bangs sending what seemed like the entire student body of William McKinley High School into a state of muddled chaos.

Rachel had found herself completely shell-shocked in both fear and confusion. Her mind was scrambling, but she couldn't' seem to find it in her to produce a comprehensive thought that may entice any sort of bodily response.

So instead, she simply stood her ground, watching terrified as the horde of her fellow classmates pushed around her, running as quickly as their legs could carry them as they looked back over their shoulders every couple of seconds or so just to make sure that whatever it was that they were running from hadn't been following.

She let out a distinct grunt of pain as one of her fellow peers' elbows caught her around her middle, knocking the wind straight out of her lungs while simultaneously pushing her aside where a cluster of students trapped her into the corner as they attempted to shove, hit, and kick their way to safety.

It was 10:53 a.m. on the morning of Friday, June 4th, 2010 when the crowd finally thinned to a level in which Rachel found the room to straighten herself upwards, pausing in her search for answers towards what had just caused that mass pandemonium.

It was 10:53 a.m. on the morning of Friday, June 4th, 2010 that Rachel Berry had finally discovered the source of the noise, only to wish that she hadn't.

It was 10:53 a.m. on the morning of Friday, June 4th, 2010 that Rachel Berry would learn the difference between a practical joke and a senseless act of tragedy.

But by then it had already been too late.

Straightening her spine fully upright, Rachel brushed the dust from her jeans before taking two large steps forward, ready to follow the large mass of students towards the main doors before a strangled cry like no other noise Rachel had ever heard before stopped her dead in her tracks.

At first, she had been convinced that the sound had been produced from some type of dying animal, because whatever it was, there was no way that it could have possibly been emitted by a human being…

But if there was one lesson that Rachel Berry was about to learn, it was that absolutely anything was possible, because before 10:53 a.m. on the morning of Friday, June 4th, 2010, Rachel Berry also would have deemed it impossible for her to watch as one of her fellow classmates stumbled around the corner of the hallway of her high school with blood dripping from a bullet hole in his neck…

But there he was.

Rachel could literally feel her eyes widening with fear as her knees began to shake uncontrollably to the point that she knew she was no longer capable of so much as walking, let alone running in the other direction towards safety…

And for the first time in her entire life, Rachel finally understood exactly what the phrase 'scared stiff' actually meant, because for the first time in her entire life, Rachel found herself completely frozen in time.

All she could do was stand, feeling as her stomach took a sickening plunge straight downwards and into her feet as the realization of the scene surrounding her quickly overwhelmed each one of her senses, making it so that she was suddenly very painfully aware of her surroundings, painfully aware that both hers, as well as the rest of the 4,239 students and faculty at William McKinley High School's lives had just changed forever.

In September of 2009, Jamie Porter had finally found himself a senior at William McKinley High School.

Early in the start of the school year, he had managed to achieve a quick rise in popularity after he had become the first person of William McKinley High School's class of 2011 to turn 18, so that after spending three years as a hopeless loser, he managed to embrace the fact that he could be well liked as long as he obliged to his fellow senior's every requests of buying them cigarettes and Play Boy magazines at the local 711.

But at 10:53 a.m. on the morning of Friday, June 4th, 2010, none of that seemed to matter anymore, because at 10:53 a.m. on the morning of Friday, June 4th, 2010, Jamie Porter had erased every social label that he had desperately been trying to put behind him for the past four years now in the blink of an eye.

Suddenly, Jamie Porter wasn't the kid willing to distribute illegal goods to minors anymore, or the loser whose bargaining chip into college was the fact that he had spent the past three years as the low brass captain of the marching band…

No, Jamie Porter wasn't much of anything anymore; he was simply just… bleeding… and somehow, he had managed to stumble directly into the line of vision of none other than Rachel Berry herself, who stood horrified with her mouth agape as she watched the blood ooze so thick and so prominently from his body that she couldn't even tell exactly where it was that it was coming from.

Horror stricken, Rachel couldn't find the power within her body to move. All she could do was watch as this young man, so child like in his vulnerability, staggered towards her several more paces, extending his blood-smeared hand in her direction and whispering his incomprehensible final plea for help before finally losing his footing, falling face forwards and motionless against the cold linoleum floor, a mere ten feet in front of her.

"Rachel Berry!"

The sound of her own name echoing loudly across the hall forced her to jump, her eyes snapping away from the boy on the ground and towards the length of the hallway in an effort to identify the source of the noise.

Her body shaking with the adrenaline spurred by fear, Rachel's terrified brown eyes locked with Suzy Pepper's piercing black ones as they glittered with malice behind the thick glass of her bifocals.

She recognized the threat in front of her for what it was instantaneously, feeling as her legs automatically shuffled the rest of her body backwards in a last desperate attempt to move herself out of the shooting range of a crazed teenager with a vendetta in her heart and a sawed off shotgun in her hands.

"Suzy…" Rachel responded simply, her voice whispering through the crack between her barely opened lips in a soft, high-pitched squeak before falling into a distant silence.

For the first time in her entire life, Rachel Berry was speechless.

Behind her, she felt as her back collided with the solid wall behind her with a dull thump, indicating that she had run out of room to back away, that she had suddenly found herself completely and utterly trapped.

"I warned you Berry." Suzy told her, her arm steady as she raised the firearm resting between her still hands and pulled the hammer backwards so that the resulting click burned like fire through Rachel's veins. "He was supposed to be mine. Mr. Schuester was supposed to be mine!"

Tears formed along the undersides of Rachel's eyes as she shook her head vigorously and pressed her body more firmly against the solid wall behind her, desperately willing herself to simply sink through the tiles and towards safety.

"He can be!" Rachel blurted when she found her former escape plan rendered unsuccessful, choosing instead to try her luck at pleading desperately for mercy, raising her arms high into the air and above her head, claiming her stance of vulnerability, emphasizing the fact that she had absolutely nowhere to go and nothing that she could think to do to get herself out of this one. "You can be Suzy… it… it doesn't have to be like this."

Maintaining the rigid eye contact Rachel was currently holding with Suzy Pepper, she refused to look away even as she caught a glimpse of Jamie Porter writhing with pain on the ground besides her through her peripherals…

Her natural instinct was screaming at her to turn, to run towards him, to run towards the exit doors, to run _anywhere_, but she didn't, terrified that even the slightest of motions would spook Suzy into becoming trigger-happy.

"No," Suzy finally responded after a long moment of silence that seemed to have lasted forever, "It does have to be this way."

Barely able to process the finality of Suzy's tone, her thoughts were overshadowed in an instant by an eruption of successive gunfire.

Rachel's vision narrowed in on the spark that had shot from the barrel of the weapon in front of her, her eyes dancing along the red, white, orange and yellow of the brief fire before the crack of the pressure wave colliding with the atmosphere as the bullet flew from its chamber distracted her, creating a sharp explosion so resounding that Rachel couldn't even hear her own thoughts over it.

But for all intents and purposes, that might have been for the best.

It felt as if the entire world had slowed down. Rachel was absolutely positive that she could literally see the bullets dancing spirals in midair as they soared closer and closer towards her general direction.

But she had found herself paralyzed; there was absolutely nothing that she could do, nothing that she could say, nothing that she could expect… except of course unless you counted the expectation that she was about to be hurt very, very badly.

It was 10:55 a.m. on a Friday morning in early June when four slugs were fired from the barrel of a Remington 1100 Tactical Shotgun, but it was only milliseconds later that they struck, plunging themselves into Rachel's chest with rapid succession; one, after the other, after the other, after the other, each hitting its intended target with a painful accuracy.

Yes, Friday June 4th, 2010 was shaping up to be just as unexpected a day as Rachel Berry could have ever possibly imagined and beyond…

It would have been impossible for her to have guessed that by 10:00, she would have made peace with the woman that she had been struggling to call her mother for the past month, that by 10:15, she would feel as if she had finally located somewhere which she belonged. She would have called you crazy if you'd said that by 10:30, she would have acquired a grandmother as well as an aunt for the first time in her entire life, or that once 10:45 rolled around, she would not only have a beautiful baby sister, but a loving goddaughter as well.

No, if you had only asked, Rachel Berry never would have guessed that by the time all of her morning classes had ended for the day, she would have acquired four new relatives to her rapidly growing family, just like she never would have guessed that by the time lunch had reared its ugly head at William McKinley High School, she would have acquired four new bullets to her chest as well…

But as Rachel Berry fell backwards against the hard, linoleum floor of an empty corridor along the second floor of William McKinley High School's west wing in the late morning hours of Friday, June 4th, 2010, too stunned to speak and too numb to move as a puddle of blood flourished underneath her body, draining the life rapidly from it, it seemed that everything that she had least expected, had been everything that she had gotten anyway.


	4. Shelby Corcoran

**Hi everybody! First and foremost, I wanted to thank everybody for all of the positive feedback to this story, it means the world really! So, with being said, I stepped out of my comfort zone a bit with this chapter and wrote in Shelby where I normally wouldn't have mainly because I'm trying to test the waters with this story (but also because I have a huge lesbian crush on Idina Menzel haha) so I hope its tolerable. **

**And although this is an ensemble fic, I know the first couple of chapters are mostly just character profiles and things of that nature and are very individualist based so I figured I'd give everybody a bit of a preview and tell you the order of the focus characters for the next couple of chapters which are (in order) - Finn, Will, Artie, Mercedes, Kurt, Brittney/Santana, Quinn, Puck, Sue, Tina. That's all I've got for right now but there will be more, I promise!  
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><p><strong>Chapter 3<strong>

**My Final Failure**

(Shelby Corcoran)

It was Friday, June 4th, 2010 when Shelby Corcoran decided that she had finally gathered enough courage and strength to confront her daughter.

It had been one week following Regionals; one painfully long, breathtakingly slow week in which Shelby had spent the majority of her time sitting on her couch, coddling her brand new daughter between her surprisingly gentle arms as she flashed periodically blank glances upwards towards the towering trophy, still presented proudly in the center of her living room…

The statue was supposed to bring her pride, it was supposed to bring her joy, but she couldn't help but notice that every time she looked at it, the only thing that it actually gave her was an overpowering twinge of pain originating deep within her very gut.

The fucking thing gave her nothing but guilt.

Shelby Corcoran had gone her entire life thinking of herself as nothing above a complete and utter failure, and although she'd chosen to use her roomfuls of choir trophies and a small group of enormously talented teenagers as decoys to present herself with confidence, the fact of the matter was that she had nothing even close to it.

It had taken her adoption of Beth to jumpstart that natural surge of maternal instinct that she'd always known to have had inside of her, and despite already being one child deep in a situation that she still couldn't say that she was completely prepared for, Shelby suddenly felt something inside of her that she couldn't quite pinpoint, something that she had never actually felt before.

She used to use this lack of empathy, this emptiness inside of her heart to justify the idea that she would have just made a lousy mom anyway…

She used to repeat the same story to herself over and over again, the one where she'd tell herself that wherever in this world that her child was right now, she was happy, and that happiness had absolutely nothing to do with her…

Yes, any and every demoralizing, critical excuse that you could ever possibly come up with to try and convince yourself that your child was better off without you, Shelby Corcoran had definitely used.

And for a little while, that would actually work.

But eventually, like most aspects of life, even that became too much to handle, and now that Shelby had finally found herself graced with the blessings of a new daughter and a second chance, it became more and more obvious to her that she didn't want Beth to have a mother too cowardly to rectify a mistake that had sixteen years worth of opportunities to be fixed.

And that was exactly how Shelby Corcoran had found herself inside of William McKinley High School's nearly empty auditorium on a beautiful Friday morning in June.

She had gone into her day expecting the worst while simultaneously hoping for the best; her only voice of confidence being the idea that she had already waited this long to start feeling good about her life again, so if things didn't quite go as planned today, well than what was the harm in waiting a little bit longer?

But she had gotten lucky, because thirty minutes into her conversation, as she watched her daughter saunter out of a vast, empty auditorium with her head held high and a new-found swagger behind her step, Shelby couldn't help but feel a sense of wonderment over the fact that she had helped to create not only that beautiful human being in front of her, but that sense of pride, of happiness as well.

So with Rachel safely out of view behind the oversized oak auditorium doors, Shelby took her daughter's staggered lead, walking back out the way she had just come in, but this time with her own head held up high and a new-found swagger behind her own steps as she carried herself confidently straight out of William McKinley High School's main doors with a distinct impression in mind that maybe, just maybe today could be a turning point in her life.

Shelby entered the welcoming warmth of the late morning air with eyes squinted up towards the overpowering sunlight and a deep breath before taking a quick right-hand turn towards the visitor's parking lot and her awaiting car.

The morning had undoubtedly proven to be a beautiful one; uncharacteristically warm, even for an early June morning in northwestern Ohio.

Shelby's mother, a pessimistic Italian New Yorker who had moved to Lima, Ohio from Brooklyn after the death of her second husband in an effort to be closer to her two daughters called days like today September 11th days; perfect in every sense of the word, but lingering with an undercurrent of a hidden tragedy yet to be unfolded in the air above, a hidden tragedy who's magnitude could never be truly comprehended by anybody around it.

In the distance, she spotted her car in the furthest space from her current position, and before that very moment, she'd had absolutely every intention of getting inside of it and driving off, really she had, but before she'd had the opportunity to exact a motion upon her plans, something suddenly stopped her…

Maybe it was the aura of this new and improved Shelby Corcoran that was slowly taking over her body, filling it to the brim with this welcomingly new can-do attitude, or maybe it was that creeping desire to complete this steadily budding family that she'd been working so hard now to piece together one by one, but before she'd even become aware of what it was that she was actually doing, Shelby Corcoran had found herself performing a complete about face, pumping her feet mechanically until she'd found herself directly in front of the semi-closed wooden door of William Schuester's closet-sized office – arriving so quickly, that she didn't even know exactly how she had gotten there…

If you'd asked, she wouldn't be able to tell you exactly why she had done it, why her feet would ever choose to betray her in such an obscenely cruel manner, but whatever the reason, the fact of the matter was that it had happened, and whether she wanted to do it or not, she didn't really have a choice in the matter as her obviously malfunctioning control center trapped within the depths of her brain practically forced her to lift her hand and rap her knuckles against the wooden door of the first man that had ever really meant anything to her in a very, very long time.

"Shelby," His eyes glanced upwards in response to her knock, the slight inclination behind his voice as he breathed her name enough to tell her just how shocked he was to see her… but then again, she couldn't really blame him.

"Will," She nodded her head slightly, her spine straightening and her chin rising in an effort to present to him in a confident fashion, "Can I come in?"

"Uh… yeah, of course," He nodded, jumping up from behind his desk in an effort to clear away the cluttered mess scattering unceremoniously across the wooden panel, desperate to do anything in his power to make his office seem more presentable under such last-minute circumstances than it actually was.

"Have a seat." He extended the offer, but Shelby merely shook her head against it, instead choosing to plant herself at the head of his desk, assuring her dominance by forcing Will to mimic her movements as he maneuvered himself strategically into a standing position so that he could make perfect eye contact with her.

"I just wanted to stop by and congratulate you on Regionals." She told him, her words forcing his eyes to break away from hers, pain seeping through his pupils at the mere memory of the defeat still lingering relentlessly in the back of his mind.

"We lost to you…"

"Yeah well…" Shelby allowed her voice to die away into nothingness, recognizing the fact that that had been a stupid means by which to strike up conversation.

"So… is this what you came all the way down here for; to gloat?" Will's eyes narrowed accusingly, glaring a hole through Shelby who couldn't seem to come up with a less accusing explanation for her own presence quickly enough to save herself.

"No, actually… I came down here to… to see Rachel." Shelby explained her motivations carefully, deciding to be blunt in her explanation, recognizing the fact that Will had been less than enthusiastic about Shelby's last attempts towards reconnecting herself with her daughter…

And that was before she had managed to break his lead singer's heart into a million fragmented pieces.

Peering up carefully towards Will, she watched as his facial expression shifted dramatically; his eyebrows raised and his pupils widening as his muscles contracted into a stern look that he accentuated by crossing his arms tightly over his chest, just to ensure that Shelby knew exactly how much he disapproved of her decision to put the poor girl through any more pain than what she had already been through.

Frankly, it offended her.

"Listen Shelby…" Will began, but Shelby stopped him before he could continue, thrusting her palm forward towards him so that she cut off Will's words before he truly had the opportunity to speak.

"I know what you're thinking Will," She informed him, trying to sound convincing in her tone when in reality, she had absolutely no idea what the hell it was that he was thinking. "I'm not here to try and take her away, I'm not here to hurt her anymore… I've asked her to try and establish a relationship with me, and she's agreed. That's it."

Will sighed so that it became instantly obvious to Shelby that her small speech had not managed to convince him, and Shelby could appreciate that, really she could; it was nice to know that there was somebody out there who cared that much about her daughter, somebody who would look out for her when she couldn't, somebody who was always willing to keep her best interests first…

But it was time for her to become that somebody now.

"I understand your concern, Will, but we're taking it slowly, and hopefully… with time, we'll be able to work something out and then…" Shelby's voice was suddenly cut short. Before she had the opportunity to allow so much as another syllable escape her mouth, she was silenced by Will as his face crashed forward, locking in a tight junction formed between their lips, forcing her words to dissipate into a long, drawn out kiss.

She opened her eyes wide in her shock; her vision focusing on Will's closed eyelids, affixed firmly shut in a combination of passion as well as the fact that he was probably too afraid to see what Shelby's reaction to his unexpected come on would be to actually look…

Her mind began to race, screaming at her to put an end to this nonsense at once… So of course, naturally, she latched onto his shoulders even tighter, threw him against his cluttered desk, and followed suite in an effort to return the favor that he'd initiated.

The scattered contents of his desktop took flight; a million paper airplanes floating strategically through the air before landing smoothly against the carpet as Shelby took advantage of their additional space to catch herself up in the heated fervor…

She had just begun struggling to loosen his tie when she was stopped abruptly.

_Bang! Bang! Bang! Bang!_

Her lips parted with his so suddenly that she'd accidentally bit him

Feeling the dull metallic clang of Will's blood entering her mouth, she snapped her head upwards, clearing her brain from its passionate fog as she leapt to her feet, unconsciously strengthening the vice grip that she still possessed around Will's tie so that she nearly strangled the poor man in the process.

"What was that?"

"It was probably nothing." Will told her, ignoring the sound completely as he tugged desperately at her hips in an attempt to return her to where it was they had left off, but Shelby wasn't complying with his lack of concern. Instead, she walked further from him, inching slowly towards the door as the familiar sensation of burning maternal instinct flared into the pit of her stomach, an intuitive notion creeping into her brain telling her that something had just gone terribly, terribly wrong within the walls of William McKinley High School.

She opened the door of Will's office a mere crack, listening all the while as Will struggled to right himself upwards, afraid that a curious, unsuspecting bystander might walk past the open door only to get a glimpse of their frazzled selves and get the wrong idea…

But the second that either of them caught a glimpse into the hallway, it became instantly obvious to the both of them that their escapades behind closed doors was possibly the least of these students' worries right now.

Screams filled their ears the second that Shelby had lifted the barrier of the wooden door; teenagers darting like mad-men up and down the length of the hallways in a wild stampede of flailing bodies, all screaming, crying, and fighting their way towards the first escape route that they could manage to find.

Will was on his feet and besides Shelby in a matter of seconds, the two of them standing and watching - as if it were a movie before them - from within the comfort of the doorframe as a second series of overwhelming banging filled their ears, causing each to simultaneously jump against each other.

They locked eyes briefly, the fear profoundly evident behind the wide globes; the looks in their faces saying everything that they were thinking… everything that they did not want to believe… everything that couldn't be possible.

It couldn't be, no, it just couldn't. This had to be some kind of a sick joke, there was no other explanation, because there was absolutely no possible way that what they had just heard erupting through the walls of William McKinley High School had been the sound of gunfire…

There was a moment in which Shelby stood frozen, taking deep, steady breaths as the adrenaline began filtering through her brain, charging her body for the inevitable task that she was about to be forced to perform.

The transition had been so quick that Will hadn't even noticed it at first, but in a flash, the black and white checkered flag wove in its symbolic start somewhere within the depths of Shelby's head, and with that… she was off.

"Shelby, no," She only vaguely registered Will's cry, but she was running faster than an Olympian sprinting the 100m track race, and if a three inch, painfully binding set of heels wasn't going to stop her, then Will expressing his distaste for her actions certainly wasn't going to either.

"Shelby!" He called again, making Shelby very aware of the fact that he had begun following her, very aware of the fact that he was willing to place his own life at risk merely to rectify her voluntary decision to throw herself straight into the cross fire.

He tried to keep up but even the full grown man with an impressive cross country background struggled to maintain a steady pace alongside Shelby Corcoran right now…

Her concern had been elevated too profoundly, her brain too pre-occupied with the screaming of a single thought, looping repetitively across her mind…

She had to find Rachel.

She fell into a distinct moment in which her world began moving so slowly that she could literally feel her bones shifting around her burning muscles, her mind tumbling in circles trying desperately to think of an empty solution to an impossible problem…

Her feet skidded to an abrupt halt across the tile ground below her as she rounded a corner, trying desperately to slow her body so that her momentum wouldn't knock her flat on her face as directly underneath her, she felt as the heel snapped clearly off of the bottom of her right shoe so that she couldn't help but think about how lucky she had been that she hadn't just snapped her entire ankle along with it…

She stopped running only upon approaching a sharp fork in the hallway, calculating this moment as not only an excellent time to lose the restrictive footwear that she was currently sporting, but also to gain a sense of her bearings as well…

It was in that moment that Shelby was suddenly made painfully aware of the fact that her knowledge of William McKinley High School's interior was strictly limited to the locations of the choir room, the auditorium, and Will Schuester's office…

In her moment of concentration, she could hear Will approaching behind her, panting and out of breath as he slowed his jog into a complete halt directly next to her, grabbing onto his knees and hunching forward in an effort to clear his ailing lungs… That man needed a gym membership and he needed one fast.

"Shelby, what the hell are you… oh my God…" His voice faltered very suddenly, becoming laced with a much deeper concern than that which had plagued him from his unexpected work out, and Shelby had the vaguest sense of an idea as to the exact origin of that concern…

Shelby Corcoran had never exactly been to hell before, but in the last few seconds of her scouring through the halls of Lima, Ohio's latest warzone, she'd gotten a fairly good sense of what it might be like.

Backpacks, textbooks, cell phones, iPods, laptops… any kind of personal belonging that you could imagine really, belonging to a student was strewn across the linoleum hallway floors, carelessly left abandoned by the students in the spots where they had been standing at the precise moment that they'd decided they valued their own lives much more heavily than they valued those material items that might have only weighed them down in their bid to escape.

The floor was littered with a trail of a thick, viscous red liquid that Shelby and Will both desperately wanted to believe was the by-product of a passing Slushee attack… even if said attack had been aimed at one of their poor, defenseless glee kids, but both adults knew better than to think that.

Two sets of eyes followed the crumb trail of blood down the length of the hallway, their pupils constricting and squinting painfully in an effort to focus on its source resting at the opposite end of the hall… two bodies lying tangled within one another, motionless from the spot where they had fallen…

And suddenly, this really was happening.

Kevin Ryan and Josh Feingold were both best friends as well as reining members of the 2010 senior class. Will managed to recognize them both immediately due to the fact that they had been in his same remedial Spanish class ever since they were freshman.

They were the type of friends that never did one thing without the other, and apparently, today that included getting shot.

Simultaneously, they jumped at the sound of an echoing gunshot – this time originating dangerously close from the adjacent staircase – served to them a stark reminder of the fact that they didn't have the time to linger on either the dead or the wounded.

For the quickest fraction of a second, the two merely stared at each other, both wide eyed and frozen stiff with fear until Shelby ultimately managed to shake herself back into initiative, darting a stiff hand outwards where she wrapped her long, slender fingers around Will's scrawny bicep, tugging him down the length of the abandoned hallway, further from the source of the ominous noise beside them.

"Will, come on, we have to find Rachel!"

Will shuddered nervously; offering the slightest sense of initial resistance towards Shelby's constant insistency, afraid that her tunnel vision towards finding her daughter was ultimately just going to get them both killed…

But Will knew that Shelby had been placed on a self-proclaimed mission, and he also knew from experience that once Shelby Corcoran had her mind set on idea, she wasn't about to give up on it all too easily… So he found himself with two options; either he could follow her, or he could save his own ass while simultaneously leaving the woman he cared so deeply about, as well as half of his students wandering alone inside of a school beside a crazed gunman…

So with that thought in mind, Will Schuester gave a tremendous sigh and muttered the briefest of prayers as he took his tremendous leap of faith and relaxed into Shelby's guiding.

They tiptoed as quickly as their feet would possibly allow them, their heads held high and ears poised for any signs of the hidden dangers potentially lurking around the corners as they stepped delicately over the prone bodies of Kevin Ryan and Josh Feingold.

Shelby allowed her eyes to linger on the ailing teens only briefly, watching as the blood casually pooled underneath them, collecting and combining, shining so brightly underneath the florescent lighting that Shelby could make out the reflection of her own face, her guilty expression towards leaving these two boys – who had just as much of a right to be rescued as her daughter did – behind.

They continued to move with slow, evenly-paced footsteps; chartering carefully their every move until another tremendous bang, one that sounded dangerously close, caused Shelby and Will to stop dead in their tracks, completely frozen with fear.

"Come on," Will whispered harshly, grabbing a handful of the sleeve of Shelby's shirt so that he could drag her around the corner to safety, only waiting until they were certain that they were completely out of sight before they stopped.

Shelby had never imagined that the sound of approaching footsteps could be so ominous, so loud, so utterly terrifying…

In the silence of the abandoned halls, every step of a boot against the tile sounded magnified a thousand times, in her heightened sense of alertness, she perceived every noise as a threat, every person as an enemy…

Trembling underneath all of the adrenaline teeming through her veins, Shelby brought her shaking hands up over her mouth, using her palms to muffle the sound of her panting breaths, praying to God that her heartbeat, currently performing a fantastic drum solo against her ribcage, wasn't loud enough to reach the ears of somebody that she didn't want to be able to find them…

Two sets of footsteps progressed closer and closer; each step took an hour, each inch they'd advanced felt like a mile…

"Do you see all of that blood?"

Shelby could never in her wildest of imaginations possibly remember ever hearing a voice sound so cool, so callous before in her life… They were so close that Shelby could hear as a gentle wisp of air emitted from between the teeth of one of the individuals besides them as he leaned closely into the two bodies, inspecting the damage that he himself had inflicted with an eerie sense of pride behind his actions.

"We should keep going, Jacob…" Around the corner, a shadow grew against the wall opposing Will and Shelby, the transparent black outline expanding larger and larger with each step forward the female assassin took towards their hiding place.

With silent tears streaming down her face and her breath stuck somewhere within the very center of her throat, Shelby pressed her body as tightly upwards against the wall as she could possibly manage, silently begging her body to simply disappear from the spot as her mind raced to tell her that this was it, that she was about to positively die.

She thought of Beth, the child that had already lost her first mother only to lose the second as well. She thought of Rachel, the girl who'd deserved a lifetime of affection from her only to be granted with none…

"Wait!" The advancing footsteps paused abruptly, the sudden silence forcing a small rush of the air previously caught in Shelby's lungs out of her mouth so that it emitted in the form of the slightest of squeals, one which she thanked God was overshadowed by the sound of the shooter's shoes squeaking to a halt mere inches away from the two hiding teachers, "I think I saw something over there."

There was a flash, the briefest of seconds stuck inside of time, and then, just as quickly as they had begun their descent upon Will and Shelby, they were gone; running backwards and travelling in the same direction that they had just came from, far away from them.

Still tense with fear, Shelby jumped so high, her bare feet lost contact with the ground below her as she felt a hand clasp firmly around her shoulder causing her to release an involuntary strangled cry, muffled only by Will's free hand slapping itself quickly up and over her mouth in a natural reaction towards trying to prevent Shelby from calling attention to them…

They had gotten lucky once before, but neither one was willing to bet that their luck would take them through another altercation such as the one they had just experienced.

"Come on," Will directed her, slowly removing the hand from her mouth as he pulled her by the elbow further down the length of the hallway, "There's another staircase over here, we'll just go hide.

"Will," Tears brimmed the undersides of Shelby's eyes as her voice trailed outwards into a desperate plea, "We have to find Rachel."

"We will Shelby. I promise we will." He spoke firmly, the guarantee that not even he was so sure he'd be able follow through as he continued to drag Shelby quickly through the back staircase, eager to locate his students but at the same time, hesitant of the potential state of which he would find them in once he did.

They walked on tip-toes through the open halls, sneaking around corners, standing as close to the walls as they could possibly manage, recognizing that as their only possible source of coverage… And like a slap delivered clear across her face, Shelby found herself painfully aware of the fact that both her and Will suddenly bore a striking resemblance to a pair of sitting ducks sitting in an open pond during hunting season.

"Oh God…" Will allowed the murmur to escape his lips but, as quiet as it presented, Shelby had still managed to have somehow heard it anyway – the greeting that had lead her across the cusp of the stairwell where she was met immediately by yet two more prone bodies, crumpled an arm's length apart from each other at the end of the hallway.

Shelby felt her eyes squint naturally into tiny slits, straining her vision and cursing her near-sightedness as she both tried and failed in her attempt at identifying the two still figures silhouetted against the hard tile floor underneath them.

They were just too far away, and at this point, the familiar scenes seemed to all merely blend together… They all looked the same, they all _were_ the same; no more than a group of pint-sized teenagers – kids…

They were all just kids.

She took a tentative step forwards, desperate, yet simultaneously terrified to see whether or not one of those "just kids" was actually her kid.

Beside her, she could feel Will shuffle uncomfortably before falling still, his eyes closed firmly with the idea in mind that maybe, just maybe if he shut them tightly enough, this would all just go away… This entire thing, this entire scene after all, was truly impossible.

Denial rang rampant between Shelby's ears as she began taking slow, tentative steps forward…

She was asleep; it was the only justifiable explanation that she could come up with to explain this surreal nightmare; she was sleeping, and she was trapped in this terrifying unconscious…

This was the kind of thing that you only read about in the newspapers, the kind of thing that only happened in some foreign country or some small town that nobody's ever heard about in a state that you could barely remember the name of…

No, whatever this was, it was definitely not the kind of thing that happened at their little known high school, named after a little known president, located in a little known town in the middle of nowhere, Ohio… It just wasn't.

Her brain was screaming at her, buzzing with orders and suggestions streaming from every direction so that she couldn't think, she couldn't formulate a single, coherent thought until eventually; she was forced to hold her hands tightly over her ears, just to get rid of the persistent hum lingering in the back of her head…

But even those efforts proved to be futile as she was brought firmly back into reality by an eruption of noise, a heavy array of successive gunfire that made it sound as if they'd just entered the grand finale of a fourth of July fireworks show rather than a high school hallway.

"Shelby…" It was the first time that Will had spoken for several minutes, but his words emitted in such a hushed whisper that he was forced to swallow and cough in his hesitation before ultimately trying again, "Shelby we have to get out of here!"

He raised his voice over the sound of gunfire as the noise below grew steadily louder and more prominent, showing no signs of stopping, or even of slowing down.

Will watched as his world transformed into slow motion, Shelby's head turning over her left shoulder towards him at a heart-stoppingly slow pace so that he could visualize her every muscle flexing as her eyes widened with fear, her face paled with panic, and, despite the cascade of gunfire stinging at Will's ears, her mouth opened into a distinct scream that rang loud and clear straight through his very head.

The thing was, once he'd heard it, he couldn't help but wish that he hadn't.

"Oh my God, Will! It's Rachel!"

Within his veins, his blood ran frozen, replaced with pure ice that solidified his entire body numb… It was the only response that he could manage, the only motion his body could perform as his chest constricted impossibly tight, deeming it unfeasible for him to suck in so much as the smallest of breaths.

He watched motionless as the older woman exploded into an awkward run down the remainder of the length of the hallway, sprinting and flailing uncontrollably so that the scene would have been humorous if the situation hadn't been so dire…

But that grim outcome pounded itself relentlessly into Will's brain, growing in its blatancy as he watched Shelby finally arrive besides her estranged daughter's side, where she dropped to her knees so hard that Will could actually hear the splashing of Shelby's kneecaps colliding with the bloodied floor surrounding Rachel's body, could see the tears formulating underneath her eyelids from all the way across the hallway.

Only twice before in the entirety of Shelby Corcoran's lifetime had she allowed herself to lose her cool.

The first time, it had been December 18th, 1994 where, after nine painful months of strict diets, countless doctor's appointments, two gay men following her every move and thirteen excruciating hours of labor, Shelby had finally given birth to the most beautiful baby girl that she had ever seen in her entire life…

And she hadn't even gotten the opportunity to hold her.

It was on that night as she sat alone in a dark hospital room, while two men nurtured and loved the child that she would never know that Shelby first allowed herself to breakdown and cry.

More than fifteen years later, it had happened again.

She had been parked illegally within William McKinley High School's senior parking lot one pathetically rainy day in late November, her car parked strategically besides the choir room door where she'd waited several long, agonizing hours just to catch a glimpse of the child that she finally knew to be her own.

And when she had finally seen her, she'd known in an instant that she'd had the right girl…

Rachel Barbra Berry was attached arm-in-arm with a boy that Shelby had easily identified as New Directions' male lead judging by his characteristically defining features, a smile on her face and the hint of a laugh echoing off of her gentle frame.

She only saw her for a second, running towards an old Chevy parked across the street with a book bag held high above her head in the form of a makeshift umbrella before she ducked down into the passenger's seat of the truck, disappearing for good.

Six seconds. She had waited inside of this parking lot for three hours only to see the girl for six seconds… but it had been the most meaningful six seconds of her entire life.

Rachel had looked good, she had looked healthy; she was talented, and she was beautiful, and absolutely none of that had had anything to do with her.

So it was on that afternoon as she sat alone in a rainy parking lot while a teenage boy nurtured and loved the child that she so desperately wanted to call her own that Shelby, once again, allowed herself to breakdown and cry.

And now, late in the morning hours on a bright, spotless morning of early June, deep within the countryside suburbs of northwestern Ohio, Shelby had found herself teetering across the brink of emotional stability once more, standing frozen within the hallways of William McKinley High School, hovering before the prone form of the child that she had finally received, that Shelby, for the third time in her entire life, allowed herself to breakdown and positively sob.

And Shelby knew what they said about third strikes.

But she needed to do something… her daughter needed her to do something, so she ran.

And for the first time in her entire life, Shelby found herself running headfirst directly into the problem rather than cowardly away from it.

"Rachel?" Shelby dropped to her knees besides the younger girl, her balance faltering as her feet slid across the surprisingly slick pool of blood formulating steadily across the ground beneath Rachel's back…

The problem was that Shelby Corcoran had never learned how to swim before, so when she finally could no longer find it in her to remain upright, and she found herself falling face forward, dousing her entire front in a pool of blood that contained half of her DNA, she felt certain that she was about to positively drown.

"Will, help me please! She's not moving! Please!" Shelby struggled to lift herself as panic rose from the very depths of her throat, her voice carrying down the hallway with an eerily high pitch behind it and a volume so elevated in its frenzy that it even overpowered the sound of the gunmen's siege, still starkly prevalent one floor below their feet.

Will wasn't particularly certain how he'd managed to do so, but somehow, he found himself forcing his legs forward, snapping upwards in his recognition of Shelby's desperate need for assistance, darting forward before dropping to his knees besides Rachel, opposite of Shelby so that he could scan her prone form in an effort to do what he could in his bid to identify the origin of the bleeding swelling rapidly underneath his young star.

But there was just so much… Will's brain scrambled, his mind unable to process anything beyond his silent questioning of just how much blood was too much blood, because he knew that Rachel Berry was a small girl, but it had become quite apparent to him in this moment that as small as she was, she had an awful lot of blood inside of her – obvious now that all of that blood was pooling gracefully around her on the outside.

He spotted a frayed bullet hole in the shoulder of her t-shirt, matted down with blood and residual gunpowder… Directly underneath that, an identical puncture wound was embedded within the center of her chest; next to that another one, and next to that, one more…

Trying desperately not o think of the implications of being shot four times in the chest, Will lifted his hands and pressed the balls of his palms firmly against Rachel's wounds, concentrating desperately on his efforts to staunch the bleeding…

"Will is she breathing? Will is she alive? Will is she okay? Please tell me that she's okay Will, please!" Will shook his head, mouth wide as a steady stream of tears subconsciously formed at the base of each one of his eyes, struggling to process, let alone answer Shelby's questions…

But the truth was, he had absolutely no idea if Rachel was breathing, he didn't even know if she was still alive… but if there was one thing that he did know for sure, it was that Rachel was definitely not okay…

"I don't…I… I…" He stuttered over his words but stopped without even bothering to complete the sentence that he knew he would never have been able to actually finish anyway.

But Shelby merely took his hesitancy as an extra source of motivation… Turning back towards her daughter, she resorted to her own method of attack in her plan to rouse the girl – grab her by the shoulders and shake her as hard as she possibly could…

"Rachel!" She screamed her plea, her voice foreign in its panic, directly into her child's ear, "Rachel please wake up! Come on, look at me, please!"

It wasn't perhaps, the most orthodox method that either would have chosen to take, but still, Will and Shelby couldn't help but direct their attention towards Rachel, desperate for any sort of response from the younger girl…

She was dead… Shelby just knew it, she knew it deep within her very heart of hearts that her girl, that her baby, that the one thing that she had ever done truly right in her life, was dead…

But then, just as she began preparing herself emotionally to halt in all of her efforts to rouse the girl, just as she began to struggling with the notion that she was giving up on the daughter that she loved once again, she moved…

It had been the slightest of twitches, the simplest of motions, but still, she'd moved…

And as Rachel Berry slowly opened her eyes into a half-lidded expression of pure agony, Shelby couldn't help but think that that motion had been the most beautiful thing that she had ever seen in her entire life.

"Ahh…" Rachel managed no more than the lowest of mumbles as she attempted to focus her eyes on the intruders that had just dared rouse her from her blissful, painless unconscious.

"That's it Rachel, come on look at me." Shelby coached the younger girl relentlessly, watching as her face, so pale, so chalky in blood loss that it blended almost perfectly with the opaque floor tiles below her, turned so that she managed to lock eyes with those so identical to her own; responding obediently to her mother's beckoning her to hold on for just a little while longer.

"Shelby…" Her voice echoed across the empty hallway as her lips quickly transitioned from a stark white to a deep blue, seeping artistically with color, directly in time with her ragged breathing growing more labored with every exhale that she took.

"Yeah honey, it's me… You do me a favor and stay right here with me, okay? It's just gonna be a little while longer, Rachel… You'll be okay, you're gonna be just fine… I promise." Desperation laced each syllable of every word as Shelby watched helplessly as her daughter entered a vicious battle against her own failing body, lingering much too closely against that fine line between life and death for Shelby's liking.

"It… hurts…" Rachel pushed the two brief words from her rapidly deteriorating lungs as her body continued to revolt viciously against her, sending her into a series of mini-convulsions as a direct response to the rapidly developing shock; the overwhelming blood loss plummeting her blood pressure into dangerously undetectable territories.

"I know it does Rachel, I know…" Shelby muttered, sweeping a stray strand of hair lightly behind the younger girl's ears in an effort to instill a sense of comfort into the both of them, "It's just gonna be a little while longer though, so you're gonna have to hold on for me." Rachel nodded feebly, a single jerk of her head as she leaned unconsciously closer into her mother's touch.

"You're safe now honey," Shelby promised, desperate to instill a sense of comfort into the daughter that she barely knew, hoping and praying that she wouldn't be coherent, or at the very least, understanding enough in her weakened state to register just how much of a lie her words actually reflected. "I'm gonna get you out of here Rachel… You're gonna be fine."

Will's eyes darted upwards in response to Shelby's words, flashing her a look of skepticism regarding the fact that she was currently dishing out promises that they both knew she wasn't necessarily sure that she could keep.

"Shelby…" Will warned her gently…

"I've got this Will, okay!" She snapped unexpectedly back at him, unusually defensive in her tone, allowing Will to understand the threat in his questioning of her, forcing him to back slowly away, his hands held upwards in an expression of surrender.

"Okay Shelby, okay… listen, I'm gonna go check on him real quick," Will nodded towards the unconscious boy beside them, "While I'm gone, I need you to try and stop this bleeding for me okay?" He directed her with a careful precision, guiding his hands upwards from Rachel's wounded chest to around Shelby's own, guiding her flattened palms firmly against the bleeding lesions before pressing firmly downwards.

She shuddered openly towards the texture of the skin underneath her touch; singed and flayed in its damage as an ever-increasing amount of blood slickened her palms raw…

But if Rachel could hold on, than so could she, so she directed absolutely every ounce of energy that her body still had inside of her into the muscles of her arms, and she planted her palms even further downward, effectively staunching the free-sweeping blood, while simultaneously causing Rachel to release a guttural cry of pure agony.

The muscles of the slim girl's chest wall contracted and tensed underneath the pressure, her soft whimpers of pain cleaving Shelby's heart into two distinct pieces, but still, she refused to let up.

She couldn't loosen her grip, she couldn't let go, she couldn't let her daughter down… not again.

"Shh Rachel, I know it hurts honey, I know, but it's going to be okay, you're going to be okay…" She tried desperately to calm Rachel through the comfort of her words, begging the girl silently to quiet before her vocals attracted one of the gunmen towards them where they would undoubtedly be finished off for good this time…

Watching Rachel carefully, Shelby's eyes followed Rachel's own as she silenced and relaxed into a distinct look of relaxation so that for a split second; Shelby believed that her words had actually worked… It was only until Rachel's eyes slowly began to roll backwards into her skull, the lids closing slowly around themselves that Shelby released that they hadn't; in fact, they hadn't even come close.

"No, Rachel come on, stay with me here, please!" She begged, retreating back to old tendencies of attempting to literally shake the girl back into consciousness, because Shelby didn't know very much about medicine… or about any kind of science for that matter, but she did know that keeping Rachel awake was without a doubt, a critical move; if not for Rachel's physical health, at the very least for Shelby's mental health.

"Please don't do this to me Rachel…" Tears cascaded freely down each cheek, creating miniature waterfalls that would drip from her chin and gather at her hands, combining and diluting the blood so that the skin turned from a sharp red to an angry pink.

Eyes opened into slits, Rachel nodded compliantly towards her mother's desperate request before, using all of the strength that she had left inside of her, and Shelby was certain of that much, Rachel lifted a feeble arm upwards, allowing it to linger above her chest for only the briefest of seconds before bringing it to a freefall; her hand dropping directly on top of Shelby's so that they intertwined perfectly, glued together by the sticky traces of blood still seeping relentlessly through the spaces between Shelby's fingers, her muscles tensing briefly, before relaxing into complete flaccidity.

"No, no… Rachel! Come on Rachel, wake up for me!" Shelby screamed, she cried, she threw a genuine temper tantrum, but her pleas fell upon deaf ears; Rachel was beyond the point of conscious response, Shelby knew that much, and her only source of comfort rested in the fact that the woman could still feel the shallow motions of Rachel's chest rising and falling against her trembling hands.

"Shelby, what is it! What happened?" Will's voice called to her from across the width of the hallway, his tone panicked and desperate, leading Shelby to believe that her visible panic had rendered Will with the false notion that Rachel had just lost her battle against life and death from under their watch.

"Nothing Will," Shelby sighed, trying quickly to correct the error in his assumption, "She's just… she's… she's out, Will, she's just out." Shelby stumbled across an accurate expression of her wording, finally formulating the most comprehensive sentence that she could manage, looking upwards and towards Will, away from Rachel for the first time since she'd found the girl what seemed like hours ago.

For a brief second, she just stared; watching Will as he kneeled against the second unconscious teenager within the hall, his hands pressed firmly up against the boy's profusely bleeding neck so that the skin of his hands was now decorated with a mosaic-like combination of both his blood as well as Rachel's, linking the two in a permanent bond of blood ties.

"Mr. Schue!"

The sudden presence of an unexpected fifth party shocked the stunned duo in frozen terror as they jumped simultaneously upwards, a foot each into the air.

Landing back downward against her knees with a small scream, Shelby tensed naturally in response to the impending threat, throwing her body forwards against Rachel's in an effort to protect her from the mysterious source of danger.

It was only after she hadn't instantaneously felt a bullet rip through her body that she chanced a peak upwards towards the culprit, her muscles relaxing only upon realizing that she recognized the body before her.

Shelby knew Finn Hudson's name from her budding collection of programs and Play Bills of all of New Directions' performances, she knew his face from sheer experience.

"What…" His eyes locked with his teacher's, desperate for answers, but confused as to where it was exactly that he should be looking with all of the muddled pandemonium circling around him.

But he never did get the opportunity to complete his sentence, because as his eyes drifted subconsciously over towards Shelby, kneeling alongside his unconscious girlfriend on the ground, he was silenced with realization, his eyes widening within their sockets, expanding to the point that Shelby believed them to be just on the threshold of positively bursting in response to the shocking scene in front of him.

"What the hell is going on?" His voice quivered underneath a thin layer of teetering composition as he dropped his volume and spoke with the pitch of his female soprano lead…

"Finn, somebody has a gun in the school," Will explained slowly with an eerie calm, although Shelby was more than certain that that idea had already slipped across Finn's mind at some point throughout his journey, "We have to get out of here… We have to get Rachel out of here."

"Where are we gonna go, Mr. Schue?" Finn nodded alongside the recognition that despite the grim prospects of their situation, they needed to get themselves out of this school as quickly as humanly possible, "They're everywhere…"

Will and Shelby exchanged fearful glances in a direct response towards Finn's words, each instantly recognizing the supposed impossibility of what was probably the most important tasks that their lives had ever depended on; getting outside to safety.

All at once, their worst fears were streaming into light all around them… The threat was everywhere, the danger too broad for them to so much as imagine let alone comprehend, and suddenly, the idea that probability was screaming at them that they weren't going to be making it out of this building alive struck them like a slap across the face.

"Okay… okay…" Will paused so that Shelby was practically able to see the gears churning inside of his head as he searched for the answers only to get nothing, "It'll be okay, we'll just… we'll just hide for now."

"Will…" Shelby voiced her distaste towards the idea without hesitation. She knew… hell they all knew that Rachel didn't have the time to simply just hide… She needed help, and she needed help quickly.

"I know, I know!" Will shouted, his elevated volume directed not towards her, but towards the helplessness of their situation as a whole… but as his voice faded into silence, exposing the notion that none had any better solutions to express, realization towards the fact that Will was right, that there wasn't much else that they could actually do, settled, stark against the sound of bullets flying continuously right underneath their feet.

"Listen Shelby, we'll… we'll wave down the police from a classroom, okay? We'll get her out of a window or something. It will be okay. She is going to be okay."

Shelby didn't say a single word. In her heart of hearts she knew that it was their best option… she knew that it was her _only_ option, and she didn't have the time to sit up here and think of something better… So with a grimace, and a nod of understanding, she expressed her comprehension towards the fact that hiding within a small classroom from a group of gun-wielding lunatics as she lowered her dying daughter out of a second story window towards safety was just something that they would all have to settle with…

So instead of wasting any more precious time, she stood, sliding her arms underneath Rachel's limp body, hoisting the girl impressively high into the air.

Will nodded gently in response towards Shelby's directive impulse, a silent appreciation towards her cooperation as he grabbed the second, anonymous teenager, hoisting him under his own wing in a similar manner as Shelby had taken with Rachel, both following Finn into the abandoned classroom across the hall.

Book bags littered the otherwise spotless floor, text books and notepads laying opened on each desk, remnants of the class that had occupied their crude hiding place before all hell had broken loose…

The second that they were all safely inside, Finn slammed the door shut firmly behind him, the residual bang causing each member of the room to grimace despite themselves.

Shelby's head spun in circles, searching desperately for the best spot to deposit her precious load as Will lowered his student to the floor where he stood and Finn busied himself with pushing a large bookshelf in front of the door; extra protection, just for good measure.

With quivering steps, Shelby carefully settled Rachel down against the rattling air conditioning unit in her effort to keep the girl as comfortable as possible while meanwhile, the lights above her blinked into darkness; Will taking the initiative to flip the switch in an effort to make the room appear to be as unoccupied as possible should anybody come peering through the tiny window embedded traitorously into the doorway.

Through the corners of her eyes, Shelby watched as Finn moved swiftly and immediately towards the windows, taking initiative in their desperate final escape attempt by heaving the glass open wide enough to pass themselves through.

"These stupid windows…" He grunted in the exhaustion rendered by his futile attempts towards pushing against the frames as hard as his broad muscles would possibly allow him to… But even then, the glass barely extended a crack; no way near wide enough to pass so much as a baby through, let alone the full grown, albeit petite body of Rachel, "They don't open all the way."

Shelby watched him in his efforts, chewing desperately at her fingernails as he shifted the entirety of his body weight into his front leg and rammed his shoulder against the thick glass, ready to open it, shatter it, do anything else that he could possibly think to do, only to be met with disappointment.

Turning back towards her ailing daughter, she squeezed the girl's hand tightly as a single residual tear cascaded down her prominent cheekbones, and suddenly, for the first time in a very, very long time, Shelby found herself doing something practically unheard of for her; she began to pray, begging absolutely anybody who would possibly listen to her for a miracle…

Because it was Friday, June 4th, 2010 when Shelby Corcoran decided that she had finally gathered enough courage and strength to confront her daughter…

But – as Shelby slowly began to realize – by then, it may have already been too late.


	5. Finn Hudson

**Hey guys! So first of all, sorry about the wait! Despite the fact that I was previously unemployed and had a pretty light start to my semester, things are starting to pick themselves up and I'm actually contributing to society so things just got really busy really quickly. But I'm adjusting, so hopefully the next one will be up quicker!**

**Anyway, I don't have much else to say with this one, as always, thanks again to everybody who's been reading, you guys are awesome and I hope you enjoy this one!**

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><p><strong>Chapter 4<strong>

**Landing Feet First**

(Finn Hudson)

People always used to joke that if there was ever a fire at William McKinley High School during lunch time, everybody would burn to death because there were about five hundred kids in, and only one door going out.

People always used to make that joke a lot, but the thing was, after Friday, June 4th, 2010, nobody ever made that joke anymore, because after Friday, June 4th, 2010, it wasn't a joke; it was a sad reality and everybody knew the consequences because everybody knew that if there was ever a fire, or else two troubled students plotting a full scale act of revenge at William McKinley High School during lunch time, everybody would be screwed.

The exact instant by which it turned from a sick joke to an even sicker reality was hard to pinpoint in its exact, but Finn Hudson knew that at 10:46 a.m. on the morning of Friday, June 4th, 2010, as he sat within the confines of the small, secluded glee club lunch table alongside his closest of friends, had somebody said it then, he still would have held the capacity to laugh it off.

There was no reason not to; after all, lunch at William McKinley High School had begun just as it had every other day.

He sat attentively, listening in as simple chit-chat erupted amongst friends where he would nod attentively when appropriate and laugh at all of the jokes – even the ones that nobody else would – all the while patiently devouring the cream cheese and jelly sandwich that his mother had prepared for him …

Yes, for Finn Hudson, lunch at William McKinley High School had begun just as it had every other day; the jokes were still funny, the news was still shocking, the gossip was still juicy, and it had all come together with a satisfying normalcy.

"Where's Rachel?" Ultimately, it had been Puck who'd asked the question that had already been on everybody's mind, although the inquiry slipping from his mouth of all people elicited a curious glare from each of his fellow singers, "I mean, she's the one who called this meeting, probably just to get all Nazi on us about summer rehearsals, and I for one just want to get having to hear her annoying voice over with once and for all."

Finn rolled his eyes deliberately towards Puck's failed attempt towards playing off cool his concern towards _his _girlfriend's whereabouts.

"I don't know," Finn answered, choosing to address the question despite himself, "She was in the auditorium last period; she probably got distracted with her singing or something."

His club nodded in tandem, turning back towards their respective lunches in their satisfaction towards Finn's possible explanation for their captain's uncharacteristic tardiness.

But all the while, Finn merely picked at the second half of the sandwich that he had previously been devouring, shooting rapidly periodic glances towards the set of double doors leading into the cafeteria in search for any indication of his girlfriend…

* * *

><p>It may have already been lunch time at William McKinley High School, but it was not an uncommon pattern in Finn's learning for him to have not taken away a single lesson from his previous three hours of classes…<p>

So yes, it may have already been 10:50 a.m. at William McKinley High School, but until then, Finn Hudson hadn't learned a damn thing, which is why his first lesson on the morning of Friday, June 4th, 2010 was all about just how much could happen in a matter of four minutes.

For example, Finn already knew that it took four minutes for a well-trained athlete to run a mile. He knew that it took four minutes for the average American to take a full shower or load a dishwasher, and, if you were Madonna, he knew that it took only four minutes to save the world.

Four minutes, two hundred forty seconds… a mere 0.28% of your entire day - and all it takes to change your life forever.

It was 10:50 a.m. on the dot; Finn had just brought the final crumb of his sandwich upwards towards his mouth when the first gunshot silenced the chatty cafeteria into an utter and absolute quiet.

The single bite of frayed bread crusts slipped instantly from between Finn's fingers in his surprise, falling to the floor where it would remain forever untouched.

Between the force of his pounding heartbeats, Finn listened as the noise echoed briefly before dissipating into nothingness as slowly, very slowly, several distinct whispers began to break amidst the silence; uninterested students continuing their previous conversations just as loud, if not louder than they had previously left off, the distant popping fading alongside the curiosity of their limited attention spans.

Without so much as a second glance, clueless students resumed their discussions about final exams and summer plans; oblivious to how little such topics would matter in a mere four minutes' time.

But Finn Hudson refused to allow his poised head to falter.

He had been raised across the Midwestern wilderness a hunter, his uncles enforcing it as their own, personal civic duty to become the next great male influence in Finn's life following the death of his father – and the way they saw it, what activity out there was more manly than hunting, right?

Visits to his two uncles, Gregg and Jimmy deep within the heartland of Hick-Town, USA had ensured the fact that he knew the sound of a shotgun when he heard it.

That was why Finn Hudson knew before anybody else within the vicinity of the cafeteria that somebody had just fired a gun somewhere within the walls of William McKinley High School.

"Finn, where are you going?" He hadn't even realized that he'd stood from his seat until Quinn had asked him the question, and by that time, he'd already had one foot half way out the door.

"Get out of here." His voice dropped low as he delivered his single, ominous suggestion, glancing seriously across every face aligning the table, all staring curiously upwards toward him.

"What?" Puck stared at him as if he were crazy, his former best friend's expression contorting into a look of solid confusion, watching him all the while as he began shuffling his feet rapidly towards the cafeteria's exit.

"Just do it!" Turning his back towards his remaining glee clubbers, he could only pray that they would adhere to the advice he had just shouted over his shoulder as he escaped through the cafeteria doors and into the crowded hallway with one goal on his mind and one goal only.

He had to find Rachel.

It was only two minutes later that he'd heard the noise again, and this time, when he did, there was even less mistaking it, even less of a possibility that his ears had deceived him in such an obscene manner for a second time in less than two minutes.

He paused, taking a moment to regroup as he stood stock still amidst the crowd and relished over the potential consequences of what he feared, of what he _knew_ to be roaming the hallways of his high school at this exact moment.

And then, just as suddenly as he'd been rendered utterly frozen, reality hit him once more, striking him in the form of an open palm clear across his face so that in an instant, he was off, size thirteen sneakers clamoring uncoordinatedly across the linoleum flooring in search of the one thing that mattered the most in his life.

Finn Hudson had never been a fast runner.

It was the reason that he had quit soccer at the age of seven.

It was the reason that his peewee football coach had decided to train him as a quarterback rather than a wide receiver.

But today, Finn Hudson sprinted, and even as the hoards of students plunged and pushed past him, stampeding in the opposite direction, even as his calves screamed at him in protest, yelling for him to slow down, he ignored it.

But with nothing in front of him but open hallway, Finn found himself absolutely clueless as to where it was that he should be going; his single desire to do nothing but find Rachel blinding his every other judgment as he dug the worn soles of his keds deeper into the ground and blindly pushed on, only running faster.

In fact, the only reason that he finally did stop – as he skidded around a tight corner at a 90° angle – was because he'd been forced to, halted in the form of a sudden collision, face-to-face with another individual, both bodies stumbling backwards upon the contact, tumbling to the solid ground below.

"I'm sorry, I didn't mean to, I… I…" Finn's voice faltered as he struggled to his feet, stuttering over his words as the second teen cowering below him on the ground came into a recognizable focus.

Joshua Feingold was two years older than Finn, but Finn still knew him solely due to the fact that the two had been in the same remedial math class ever since Finn was a freshman…

He just so happened to know that Josh Feingold had a notorious reputation around school for being as dumb as a post, though through months of actually taking the time to get to know the older boy, Finn had learned that this wasn't exactly for lack of trying.

The senior had been plagued with learning disabilities since elementary school, and now, as Finn leaned closer into the quivering teenager, he realized that it seemed as if he had been plagued with a bullet as well.

Clutching desperately onto his bleeding shoulder, Finn watched as the boy struggled to get back up to his feet, terrified that Finn had merely come here to hurt him once again…

He pulled himself back upright, staggering one step, two steps before collapsing entirely underneath the unbearable pain stemming from his leg, which had left the smallest of trails of blood behind, flowering underneath the pant of his jeans.

Finn reeled away momentarily, the shock of the scene unfolding right in front of his very eyes becoming too much for him to handle; so much so that he hadn't even noticed the second body lying on the ground until Josh, in his continuing efforts to back away from Finn, got tangled within its pair of limp legs and fell motionless onto his back, unable to withstand the pain to pull himself back up once again.

Finn's mouth plummeted open, his trembling hands unconsciously outstretched and hovering away from his body as he struggled to decide exactly what it was that he should be doing with them…

His brain was screaming at him to run, to get the hell out of this hallway as quickly as humanly possible, but he had already designated himself this self-appointed mission, this motivation to push forward; he had to find Rachel, and he had to find her fast.

So instead of turning and bolting in the opposite direction, Finn instead ran forward, dropping to his knees besides the wounded students in front of him.

"Josh, Josh man, it's me, it's Finn… what's going on? What happened to you?" He begged for an answer, his eyes scanning continuously between Josh and the second body, which Finn immediately recognized as Josh's best friend Kevin Ryan.

"We… we were leaving gym class." The older boy panted in his attempt to gain some control over his breathing, "It was me, Kevin and Jamie… on our way to eat lunch. That Jacob Israel kid, the one that's in your grade… he shot Jamie… I can't find him Finn, he shot him right in the face and I can't find him."

Finn's eyes darted subconsciously up and down the length of the halls surrounding them, but he saw no signs of the alleged third victim; dead or alive…

Finn's mind wandered to a thought too painful for him to even think about right now; the gym was all the way on the other side of the school, and Josh said that Jamie had been shot in the head…

Finn didn't say so, but he had a feeling that the fact that Josh and Kevin had made it this far across the school was a miracle in itself… maybe Jamie just hadn't been so lucky.

"It's okay, he'll be okay," Finn tried desperately to assure his friend, but he could only hope and pray that the uncertainty laden behind his voice hadn't been caught by the bleeding teenager in front of him.

"Can you walk?" Finn changed direction, desperate to turn the route of conversation around quickly as he began to gather the unconscious Kevin Ryan into his arms. "Come on, I'll help get you out of here, but you have to try and walk for me, okay?"

Finn begged the boy to find a single source of hidden strength inside of him, watching as the older teenager struggled to return to his feet, finally achieving his task only upon leaning the majority of his body weight against Finn's shoulder for support.

Panting alongside his burning muscles, Finn dragged the 215 pound line backer across the floor, the equally as large, if not larger Joshua Feingold clutched burdensomely at his arm, pulling with all of the might his body had to offer towards the west side entrance, dropping the two directly out of the main doors into the safety of the natural sunlight.

"Josh, you'll be okay here. I have to go back inside and find somebody but don't worry okay, they'll find you here…" He pleaded with the boy to follow his request, assuring him of the fact that he wasn't precisely certain of that the police had to be on their way by now, that somebody would eventually locate the two injured teenagers.

But Finn never waited for a response.

Instead, he turned abruptly backwards towards the darkened building, poised and ready to perform a full sprint back inside of the warzone that had previously been his high school, getting no more than two full steps in before he was tripped up by something very large, something very solid, something that threw him about ten feet out in front of him where he plunged face first into the dirt so hard that he tasted blood, spilling from his lip - split into two - in waves.

He groaned from the pain radiating through his scraped palms and cut lip as he slowly lifted himself up onto his hands and knees, straining his neck backwards behind him in an effort to identify the object that had so harshly thrown him.

His eyes focused slowly, gradually widening in the shock of recognition as his vision danced across the prone object behind him, the shell of a body; eyes wide and staring, yet looking at absolutely nothing, face pale, blood pooling around a bullet hole pierced straight between his eyeballs.

Finn's mouth opened in a silent scream, his eyes bugging outwards until they were twice their normal size, but for the life of him, he couldn't seem to bring himself to move.

Finn knew Brian Saralli from his days on the football team. The boy was a year younger then Finn, only a freshman, but still already well on his way towards a prestigious scholarship to play football…

Oregon and Michigan State had already expressed interest in offering him a full ride; a once in a lifetime opportunity to become one of the few that would ever have the chance to leave Lima, Ohio forever… until now, that is.

He staggered to his feet, his shaky knees somehow managing to allow him to maintain a standing position as his lanky limbs quavered until finally, he steadied; the support of his own two feet being the only motivation that he needed to turn himself back towards the school where he ran; tears stinging his eyes as he pushed forwards, looking behind his shoulder frequently so that he could be sure that Brian Saralli was still dead, that Kevin Ryan and Joshua Feingold were still unconscious…

Leaving steadily fading, bloody footsteps behind in his wake, Finn crossed the barrier that separated his outside freedoms from an indoor hell on Earth, the transition siphoning in a manner that might as well had changed night into day.

Stumbling up the staircase, Finn pressed the palms of his hands deep into his ears as a series of deafening gunshots pierced his eardrums painfully, forcing him to wince in the agony…

Practically crawling on his hands and knees in an effort to get as far away from the sound of gunshots as humanly possible, he allowed them to fade distantly into the back of his mind as he emerged within the second story of his high school, nothing but empty corridors surrounding him.

He moved slowly, a new, never before excised precision lingering behind his step as he tip-toed up the stairwell, jumping with every gunshot he heard, every creak that echoed; his sensitized precision forcing him to stumble backwards, breath silenced, eyes focused in an attempt to recognize a small group of people huddled over each other in the openness of the otherwise empty corridor.

Adrenaline pulsed through his veins so that his senses narrowed into a state of almost unheard of acuteness. He'd achieved the hearing of a well-trained dog, the sight of a prowling hawk in less than five seconds flat.

And slowly, as his pupils began constricting into an exact focus that his flawless vision had preciously graced him with, he identified the unmistakable form of William Schuester.

Comfort surged through his veins, spreading across his body with coveted warmth as his feet automatically carried him towards the man he easily considered to be like a father to him, every step that he took producing a clearer and clearer picture of the scene in front of him…

Ten steps in; he'd managed to make out the profile of none other than Shelby Corcoran herself; head coach of Vocal Adrenaline and enemy to all things New Directions, particularly to Finn strictly for personal reasons.

She was currently placed right at the top of Finn's shit list for not only beating his team in Regionals but also for subsequently breaking his girlfriend's heart in the process.

He hadn't intentionally snuck up behind them, nor had he meant to terrify them into a near cardiac arrest, but moods were understandably testy at the moment, so when he spoke, his voice emitting in a higher pitched yell than what he'd previously intended, it gave him nearly as much of a surprise as it had them.

"Mr. Schue?"

Finn's eyes never left Shelby's as the older woman's pupils widened into orbs, her body leaping abruptly into air, hovering protectively over a bleeding body that Finn could not immediately identify underneath Shelby's cover.

Her muscles relaxed slowly, recognizing Finn as being no immediate threat so that she allowed her shaking hand to lower away from her pounding heart as she lifted her body carefully over the student that she had been trying to protect with such a mysterious desperation.

"What…" Finn's eyes darted back and forth within their sockets, his glance switching sporadically between the two teachers as his brief sentence drifted off into nothingness… He didn't know what to say, he didn't know what to do, so instead of saying or doing anything, he merely surveyed the every detail of his surroundings, trying to take every piece of it in all at once until finally, his brain slowly began to comprehend the fact that the girl that Shelby Corcoran had previously been protecting with absolutely everything that she had wasn't just any girl; it was _his_ girl.

It was his Rachel lying injured, bleeding and positively dying on the very floor at his feet.

"What the hell is going on?" He stuttered on his words, his voice quavering with a significant hesitancy underneath the intensity of all of the emotions currently bubbling beneath the surface of his skin as a second round of heavy gunfire began to erupt underneath his feet.

"Finn, somebody has a gun in the school." Mr. Schuester had always presented as being Finn's voice of reason, his saving grace, ever since the day that he had joined the glee club… No matter the situation, it always seemed to make him feel better every time that Mr. Schuester opened his mouth; so when the man that he'd grown to care so deeply for looked him directly in the eye and expressed to him nothing but fear and doubt, Finn knew that it was time to panic, that it was time to get scared…

And when he did, he realized that he had never felt so utterly hopeless ever before; not once in his entire life.

"We have to get out of here… We have to get Rachel out of here."

A pang of anguish stabbed across Finn's heart towards the complexity of such a seemingly simple task; impossibly complicated by the threat lingering directly below their feet.

But Mr. Schuester had been correct in his stating of the obvious; they did have to get out of here… _she_ needed for them to get out of here. The only problem now, was that Finn couldn't seem to formulate a possible plan by which they would manage to get out of here alive.

They were stuck, stuck within these ever-closing walls so that every route towards freedom that Finn mapped out inside of his head lead to a dead end, leading him to believe that ultimately, they would not only be trapped like dogs, but they were gonna die like dogs too.

"Where are we gonna go, Mr. Schue?" Finn's voice was laced with pessimism, an uncharacteristic trait for the leader who was more often than not, the guy that everybody turned to for a spark of hope in a time of crisis, "They're everywhere."

He watched as the two adults exchanged simultaneous glances, their faces exposing the unadulterated fear that forced Finn's stomach to sink in a despair-ridden free fall.

"Okay… okay…" Mr. Schuester paused momentarily, his face scrunching up in a deep concentration, wracking his brain for anything close to an idea in his bid for answers, but with every second that passed by with Mr. Schuester remaining just as silent, just as clueless, a little bit more hope was lost somewhere deep inside of Finn Hudson's soul. "It'll be okay," He assured, but his words were unconvincing, "We'll just… we'll just hide for now."

"Will…" Shelby's voice rang deep with her skepticism towards Will's ultimate decision before Finn so much as had the time to process the potential consequences of his teacher's plan… But the second that his mind clicked with the realization, he knew; he knew just as the two adults in front of him knew that Rachel didn't have the time to simply just hide and wait this out, and by the looks of things, neither did the second bleeding teen lying right beside her; a boy that Finn recognized as the friend Josh Feingold had been so desperately searching for right before Finn had dragged him from the school; Jamie Porter.

"I know, I know!"Mr. Schuester was shouting in a manner that Finn had never heard from his mentor before, frustration laced deep within the back of his voice, forcing Finn's heart to clench in the utter desperation, the hopelessness… "Listen Shelby, we'll… we'll wave down the police from a classroom, okay? We'll get her out of a window or something. It will be okay. She is going to be okay."

Not a word was expressed in the finality of Will's tone, a solid thirty seconds of silence lingering so thickly across the air that had it not been for the rejuvenated ring of fresh gunshots catapulting in haunting echoes off of the walls around them, Finn was certain the tiny triad would have stayed still and silent as stone inside of that hallway for hours.

But they did not have hours; they all knew that, so when Finn watched as Ms. Corcoran heaved his girlfriend impressively high within her arms, as Mr. Schuester brought the unconscious senior besides him into a well maneuvered fireman's carry, he knew that he had to do something, so he did the one thing that he could think of; he guided, leading the four bodies straight into the abandoned classroom directly adjacent to them.

Slamming the classroom door shut behind him, Finn flipped the lock carefully, the residual click filling like music through his ears, as he pressed his back firmly up against the wall, chest heaving uncomfortably as he surveyed the area, begging his brain for a solution to this seemingly dead end.

The room presented with an eerie sense of abandonment. Desks sat in perfectly straight rows, notebooks aligning their table tops with pens and pencils arranged in preparation for use… Across the chalkboard, the various conjugations of the French verb "être" lingered in the wake of its students, embedding itself into Finn's mind so that he would forever remember how to express this meaning of "to be" in any of its contexts.

In fact, the only thing missing from this seemingly flawless lesson plan was the people.

"Finn, don't stand by the door," Mr. Schuester instructed, beckoning Finn with a motion of his hand to advance further into the classroom, further from harm's way.

He nodded his compliance towards his teacher, his eyes flashing wildly for the briefest of seconds in his bid to find anything that may be heavy enough to push in front of the door and provide them with, at the very least, a sense of extra protection before he found it – a waist-height bookshelf, mere inches from the door…

Scampering behind the self-assigned barricade, he gave the furniture piece a firm shove; it's sheer bulk alone combined with the stacks of encyclopedias littering its shelves making it impossibly heavy… But if anything, its weight provided Finn with an extra sense of motivation, an air of confidence that this would achieve success in the protection that it was created to offer.

Muscles strained and sweat lining his brow, he nestled the case successfully in front of the door before jumping slightly despite himself as the lights flickered into darkness above him…

The thought of how strangely horror-movie-esque this whole scenario was rapidly becoming now that the power had gone out briefly crossed his mind before he noticed Mr. Schuester, one hand descending from the light switch, the other holding a finger up in front of his mouth indicating for Finn to remain silent, indicating that it was all okay… or at the very least, as okay as it could possibly be.

Offering a quiet nod of understanding, Finn's eyes turned past his teacher towards Rachel, fear of what he would see laying across the classroom floor gripping against his insides…

Shelby was busying herself with the girl, but he was pleased to see that her chest continued to rise steadily up and down… For now, she was in safe hands, but the problem was, he couldn't help but think that their time frame of _for now_ was rapidly running out.

They needed to find a way out of this classroom, and they needed to do it fast.

That was why the first place that Finn ultimately decided to turn to upon stepping away from the barricaded classroom door was the windows.

Flipping the locks of the frames open, he jammed his palms firmly against the glass, smudging a series of bloodied handprints behind as he pushed as hard outwards as his muscles would possibly allow him to.

Underneath the pressure, the frame gave the slightest of wiggles, sliding outwards into the open air, opening gently into the tiniest of cracks before stopping completely.

"No, no, no, no…" Finn's thoughts began running wild as he separated his feet, widening his stance into the squared position that his years of football had taught him was his most dominant, using the extra leverage against the ground to force open the window a little more, but there was no use; beyond the mere inches his original efforts had given him, the pane didn't so much as budge.

He knew that it was no use; at the beginning of the school year, the William McKinley zoning board had passed a borough ordinance that demanded air conditioners to be installed into the window units of every classroom across the entire school in an effort to help ease the sufferings of those students with burdensome allergies.

More recently, they had begun sealing the windows so that the students who didn't understand the idea behind a good dollar wouldn't be able to open them while the air conditioning was on, subsequently saving both money and energy while at the same time robbing both Rachel and Jamie Porter of their lives.

"These stupid windows…" Finn grunted heavily as he directed his attention towards the window's frame work, deciding that if he couldn't get the window open, his next best option would be to simply push the entire unit straight from the wall, "They don't open all the way."

For the most part, he was talking completely and utterly to himself, but he knew his tone of utmost desperation was rubbing off across both Shelby and Will who, as he was consciously aware of, were staring up at his useless endeavors with concern written clear across both of their features.

And he wasn't going to lie, as he pushed harder and harder against the frame with no more success than he had been met with beforehand, Finn Hudson couldn't help the feeling of worthlessness that had suddenly washed over him.

With Ms. Corcoran actively trying to save his girlfriend, and Mr. Schuester actively trying to save one of his fellow classmates, Finn was very much so aware of the fact that he was saving absolutely nobody.

Hell, he couldn't even open a damn window in order save himself.

Grunting in his determination, he took several steps backwards, racing forwards and working with his momentum as he dropped his shoulder and threw the entirety of his bodyweight against the glass.

But still, it didn't budge.

So shaken from his failure, and desperate for a miracle, he wound up and repeated his actions, met with just as little success as the first attempt yielded…

It was only as he was positioning his body for a third offense that he was halted; silenced as his ears strained in the single most beautiful noise that he had ever heard in his entire life.

Sirens.

Eyes darting across the coveted scenery beyond the barrier of un-opening windows, Finn watched, eyes alert and shining with hope as the first police car careened around the corner, leading the convoy as it was followed by another one, and then another one, followed by an entire brigade of police vehicles and SWAT cars as they lined themselves up in front of the school.

"They're here," He announced, hope budding across his chest as a wide smile splayed across his face, "The police are here, they're gonna come for us. We're gonna be okay!" He pulled himself from the window, relief flooding his features, dissipating the seemingly hopeless task he had made of opening them in the first place.

They didn't need windows anymore, they were about to be saved.

"Rachel," He breathed his relief, dropping to his knees besides his girlfriend, begging his air of happiness to release upon her, to help her to hold on for the next minute or two until they were rescued. "Rachel, the police are here. We're going to get you out of here, you're gonna be okay now."

He delivered the promise, clutching onto the girl's free hand so that her blood slipped across the webs of his fingers as she looked upwards toward him, pain brimming her eyes as she managed the shortest of nods, the only response that her weakened muscles could allow at the moment; but Finn took the action as an affirmative response anyway.

His neck slanted upwards on its own accord, eyes locking with Ms. Corcoran's above him.

The woman was identical to Rachel in every possible way, leaving him unable to help but flood with the awkward strangeness of this being the exact image of Rachel twenty years from now.

But he struggled to comprehend why it was there was so much pain behind her eyes… Hadn't she heard a thing that he had just said? The police were coming, they were going to rescue them, and everything was going to be okay.

"Finn, Finn, listen to me." Mr. Schuester addressed him with a chilling panic that forced Finn to subconsciously clutch Rachel's hand even tighter between his own, "Did you see anything? Did you see who the shooter was, Finn?"

"N-no," Finn stuttered, mouth agape towards the fact that these adults, these teachers were clearly blinded in their panic despite the fact that help was mere seconds away. "No, but I saw Josh Feingold and Kevin Ryan, Mr. Schue… Josh told me that one of them was that Jacob Ben-Israel kid… you know the one in the AV club, with… with the gossip columns. But he's not the only one Mr. Schue… I don't know who else or how many, but he's not the only one."

The room faded into a lingering silence, the only noise to be heard being the soft tumbling of the air conditioner buzzing behind the strangled sound of Rachel's breathing as she struggled to inhale more and more with every breath that she took; a soft cry emanating from between her slightly parted lips seemingly in response to Finn's news…

"I took them out of the school, Mr. Schue." Finn continued his story, now that he had been given the opportunity to express his terror, allowing the words to spill endlessly from his mouth, "I saw Brian Saralli… he's dead, Mr. Schue, they shot him… right in the head… he was bleeding everywhere, and Leah Monahan… I don't know if she was alive or not, she was just… lying there, she wasn't moving or anything. Oh God, Mr. Schue… I think she was dead… I don't know what the hell is going on… why is this happening?"

Images of the dead, of the wounded that he had stumbled across, twisted like pretzels on the floor below him danced tauntingly in front of his eyes, skipping faster and faster like an endless video streaming in fast-forward.

His massive hands were trembling visibly to the point he could no longer control their actions as he struggled to tangle his fingers through his hair in an attempt to calm himself down.

"Okay Finn, listen to me, it's gonna be okay, it's all gonna be okay." Mr. Schuester grasped Finn by the shoulders, attempting desperately to calm down the panic that he had stirred, "How about… how about you check up on what the police are doing outside."

Finn nodded in his recognition towards Mr. Schuester's motivations towards his assigned task, looking to calm the boy down before he merely made the situation worse for not only himself, but for those around him that needed him sane the most.

Eager to accomplish the assignment, he staggered back upwards to his feet and peered gently out of the feebly open window.

There had to have been at least a hundred police officers, all arranging themselves rapidly in a straight line across the school's entrances, dressed down in pure black, helmets with the abbreviation S.W.A.T. emblazoned on the side plastered on top of their heads and M-16s held steady in their hands, nozzles all aligned in their perfect steadiness towards the school.

The only problem now was that none of them seemed to be moving… In fact, none of them even so much as looked as if they were considering making that heroic plunge inward and towards the school… None of them appeared to have any intention on saving them at all.

"They're… they're not doing anything." Finn's voice faltered as he relayed the image before him towards those behind him that could not see, his eyes scanning up and down the seemingly endless rows of still officers, his breathing increasing in his fear until he was damn near hyperventilating. "They aren't even moving!"

He hadn't particularly meant to shout the second time, but that's what he had done anyway as that miniscule feeling of hope that had been running through him ever since the appearance of that initial cop car flickered briefly before extinguishing completely.

They weren't going to come. They weren't going to save them. They were going to sit in the safety of the outside world and wait in game plan while meanwhile; Rachel's life, as well as that of every other human being inside of this school became more and more uncertain with each second of hesitation.

He forced his eyes from the window, his gaze darting between Ms. Corcoran and Mr. Schuester in search of answers from either one of them, their seeming lack of surprise towards Finn's announcement only causing him more frustration.

"Finn," Ultimately, it was Shelby Corcoran that had chosen to address him, her wide eyes filled with fear as she raised them from her daughter below her to match with Finn's, "I don't think that they're going to come in here."

"No, no," Finn shot down her skepticism immediately, "They just don't know that we're in here. We just have to let them know that we're here, that we need help, then they'll find us, then they'll come…" He walked towards the window he had merely cracked open only moments ago although it felt like hours and stuck his head as far as he could through the miniscule opening so that he could feel the cool wind of the day's air breathing down upon his face.

"HELP!" He screamed with such intensity that his body shook underneath the strain of his vocal chords, "HELP, WE'RE IN HERE, HELP!"

"Finn, Finn, no," Mr. Schuester ran up towards him, grabbing him strongly around the shoulders to tug him away from the window, blocking Finn's view of the uniformed men outside who appeared to be making no motions towards Finn's desperate begging as if they hadn't even heard them to begin with, "We can't draw attention to ourselves Finn. It will be okay, they're gonna come."

"We have to let them know that we're up here!" Finn's voice emitted as a plea, tears dancing involuntarily across his eyes, "We have to get them out, Mr. Schue… Maybe… maybe if we make a sign, they'll see it… they'll know we're up here."

"That's… not a bad idea actually." Mr. Schue's eyes widened in the brilliance of such an apparently simple idea, pausing in his motions for only the briefest of seconds before he darted upwards and away from Finn, scouring the room for any sort of materials that could be used to make an effective printed cry for help.

Finn watched him in his actions, almost graceful in the path he took as he lunged towards the teacher's desk in the front of the room, grasping at an oversized poster board with a student's visual project of World War II displayed across the front…

Mr. Schuester flipped the project over, displaying its blank, white backside as he grabbed at a thick permanent marker rolling across the desk top, uncapping it rapidly with his teeth before writing with a hurried silence in thick block letters –

"_2 bleeding to death HELP_"

Discarding the marker against the floor without even bothering to so much as re-cap the implement, he began tearing pieces of duct tape into thick strands, aligning them strategically against the poster board before pressing it, facing outwards, against the clear glass window.

Staring at his apparent success, accomplished pride washed over the two men in regards to what was bound to be a successful endeavor, until a desperate cry for help stemming from somewhere behind them effectively distracted their attention while simultaneously erasing any notion of safety that had crossed their paths.

"Will!"

Shelby Corcoran had shouted for the assistance of his teacher, but her panic made it so Finn couldn't help but turn towards the source of her apparent distress, where she continued to hover above Rachel who in turn, was lying motionless on the floor, body flaccid and head sagging limply as her lips began growing a deeper and deeper shade of blue with each second that passed

"Will, she's not breathing!"

Finn would have sworn to the fact that in that moment, his heart literally stopped beating inside of his chest.

He wanted to get up, he wanted to do something, but suddenly it seemed as if his legs had turned into a mysterious Jello-like substance. All he could do was watch, helpless in his actions as Mr. Schuester darted from the window that he had previously been standing at towards Rachel's side, dropping to his knees besides his girlfriend's body in an effort to offer her the assistance that Finn knew he just couldn't seem to bring himself to accomplish.

Linking his hands together back to palm as if it were some sort of cryptic puzzle, Mr. Schuester placed his joined appendages firmly down against Rachel's sternum before, with a quick deep breath of self-assurance, he contracted his muscles in synchronized compressions, performing thirty solid pumps downwards against Rachel's chest before leaning forward to breathe precious oxygen into her starving lungs.

It was only after Mr. Schuester had rounded to perform a second cycle of the lifesaving action that Finn finally regained the feeling back in his legs so that he was able to manage a shaky step forwards, one thought racing relentlessly through his mind so that this time, he knew he wasn't going to stop until he succeeded.

This was it. Now more than ever, they needed to get Rachel out of this room.

With gunfire still exploding underneath his feet successively every couple of seconds, showing absolutely no signs of stopping any more than it had ten minutes ago, Finn knew that there would be absolutely no way that they would be able to get all three of them, carrying two completely immobile teens, out of the front door…

The windows were their only option – the firmly sealed, disgustingly stubborn windows that Finn had already given up on once.

But seeing no other way out of this seemingly hopeless mess, he decided to pull his endeavors out of retirement as he once again, approached the thick glass.

With his breathing increasing exponentially and sweat dripping steadily from his forehead, permanently wrinkled in his concern, Finn turned towards the room's interior in search for anything that looked big enough to effectively break through these windows.

It was his only hope. It was _her_ only hope.

Finn's mind was racing; his ears were ringing, his vision dancing in hyper-sensitive circles in front of his eyes so that the entire room seemed to be suddenly magnified.

Ms. Corcoran was in hysterics, her frantic sobs pounding relentlessly inside of Finn's skull until his head began to hurt, the sound of Mr. Schuester's closed fist slamming itself as hard as it could against Rachel's ribcage, echoing like a bass drum only making the pain worse.

In his greatest of desperations magnified by the steady pain lingering throughout his head, Finn decided that it was time to take any possible measure necessary to achieve the rescue they so desperately needed, motivation empowering action as he wrapped his fingers with a white-knuckled intensity around the corners of the first classroom desk that he saw, lifted it up high into his chest, and heaved it as hard as his strained muscles would allow him to against the window.

His actions escalating in slow motion, he watched as the heavy piece of furniture struck the thick layer of polycarbonate glass with a solid force and an ear-splitting residual bang before merely rolling across the floor, leaving the window above without so much as a scratch, just as unbroken as it had been before.

With his mouth wide in his shock, Finn stared at his unsuccessful final attempt at rescue, the tunnel vision of adrenaline narrowing out Ms. Corcoran's harsh cries, and Mr. Schuester's continuous shouts as he screamed at the oblivious Rachel to breathe in the hopes that maybe that might jolt the voluntary reflex until all noise merely disappeared from his senses completely.

The hopelessness of his situation closed in around his skull, increasing the pressure and making it nearly impossible for him to breathe as his body sunk downwards against the seemingly impenetrable wall until he was resting firmly against the floor, free to bury his face deeply within the palms of his hands, block the barrier that had until now been effectively blocking the tears stinging at the backs of his eyes, and cry harder than he had ever cried in his entire life.


	6. Will Shuester

**Hey guys! So I've been slacking, I know (please don't kill me haha). But I wrote this chapter in an angry impulse fit when I was mad/depressed about the Yankees losing the other day. Literally wrote this chapter in tears, I'm surprised I didn't just kill everybody off right here in his chapter I was so mad haha. **

**But anyway, bad news for me is good news for all of you because I literally cranked this puppy out in 24 hours. So I hope you enjoy it, as always big thanks/shout out to everybody paying it the slightest bit of attention, love you all.  
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><p><strong>Chapter 5<strong>

**Playing God (And Raising Hell)**

(Will Schuester)

The mere sight of blood used to be enough to send William Schuester into absolute pieces.

As a child, he used to tell his parents that when he grew up, he wanted to become a surgeon, until one day, when he was eight years old, his best friend at the time, Craig Mari fell off of his skateboard cruising faster than a car down a steep incline and tore his face up so badly that he needed to have three different plastic surgeries just to put it back together again, all with Will watching horrified in the background.

Somehow, Will had managed to cry even harder than his poor injured friend had on that day and ended up sobbing the entirety of his bike ride home before he sprinted straight through the front door, pushed past his two bewildered parents, and hunched immediately over the inside of the toilet bowl, throwing up the entirety of his stomach's contents into the water below until the thing was damn near overflowing.

It was that night that his father came into his bedroom as he was recovering from his recent episode, placed a firm hand against his shoulder and told him – "Son, maybe you should consider going into accounting."

Yes, the mere sight of blood used to be enough to send William Schuester into absolute pieces, but following the events of Friday, June 4th, 2010, Will was certain that had somebody so much as mentioned the word blood to him ever again, he would probably just drop dead right there on the spot.

His hands were shaking, sweat dripping so heavily down his forehead that it obscured his vision, but Will Schuester was determined.

Refusing to allow any of these outside nuisances get in his way, he continued in his application of a heavy pressure against the carotid artery of Jamie Porter's neck, blood seeping endlessly from the bullet hole lodged deep underneath the skin so that it puddled relentlessly across the floor, smearing across his hands, his clothes, everywhere…

On occasion, he found himself glancing over his shoulder towards where Rachel and Shelby lay, his eyes subconsciously lingering as, like himself, the older woman desperately attempted to maneuver a successful method to stop the blood flowing from Rachel's chest in rivers.

But there was just so much of it… The hallway immediately outside of the barricaded door in front of them had already been painted red, and Will knew that this classroom, their makeshift bunker, was well on its way to achieving an identical, if not worse-off status.

"Rachel," Beside him, Will's male lead breathed with a steep sigh of relief towards the police presence directly outside of their classroom, a sigh of relief that Will believed to be unwarranted although he would never say so out loud and subsequently and subsequently destroy the final bit of hope that the boy still had left inside of him, "Rachel, the police are here. We're going to get you out of here; you're going to be okay now."

Will couldn't help but to cringe towards the promise, watching as Finn clutched onto Rachel's hand, the girl glancing up towards him with a grimace and a false nod that made it so that it became starkly apparent to Will that Finn was the only one inside of this room still in denial about the intentions of the police directly below them.

Will knew the reality of the situation. Shelby knew it, hell, even Rachel seemed to have known it… And deep down within his very heart of hearts, Will knew that Finn must have known it too.

The police weren't coming for them, at least not within the time frame that they required in order to get Rachel and Jamie out of this classroom alive.

"Finn, Finn listen to me," Will re-routed the direction of conversation quickly, desperate for answers, desperate for a plan that would leave him in a better position than being stuck inside of an abandoned classroom with the threat of two of his students' deaths lingering directly above his head like a shadow and fear of the unknown fogging his mind to prevent any trace of rational thought from escaping, "Did you see anything? Did you see who the shooter was, Finn?"

"N-no," He watched as the younger boy's face set into a horrified confusion as he slowly begin to process the magnitude of such a seemingly simple question… Shaking his head slowly from side to side, Finn hunched awkwardly above Rachel's frame, miniscule in size as compared to his own so that the scene could have been humorous had it not been so dire.

"No, but I saw Josh Feingold and Kevin Ryan, Mr. Schue…" Will nodded somberly in his recognition of Finn's statement, a silent confirmation that he too had run into Josh Feingold and Kevin Ryan in his travels, most likely mere moments before Finn had, "Josh told me that one of them was that Jacob Ben-Israel kid… you know the one in the AV club, with… with the gossip columns."

With a sharp inhale of oxygen, Will reacted with an involuntary emotion towards Finn's news, rubbing his fingers harshly through the frayed ends of his frizzled hair as he forced himself to turn away from the explanation…

He knew Jacob Ben-Israel, of course… He knew him from the countless stories of torment that Rachel used to saunter into glee club with about him, he knew him from the time he'd actually allowed him to fill in as their twelfth member for Sectionals in Finn's absence…

He knew all of the things that people always said about him, he knew about Jacob's power throughout the school, what he was capable of, what he could do… But still, never in Will's wildest of imaginations could he have ever imagined Jacob Ben-Israel to be capable of _this_ much damage, of _this_ much pain.

"But he's not the only one Mr. Schue… I don't know who else or how many, but he's not the only one."

Will chose not to respond to Finn's final statement, turning away in the hopes that the boy would understand that he physically _couldn't_ find it inside of him to respond as all words merely sunk low within the depths of his body, leaving his stomach feeling as if somebody had just filled it with a bucket of ice…

He couldn't hear a damn thing, the noise narrowing in around him in a natural response implemented by his body in an effort to try and block out the desperate gasps of strangled air escaping from Rachel's mouth every time that she inhaled – gasps that sounded just as painful to Will as he was certain they felt to Rachel.

"I took them out of the school, Mr. Schue." Finn rambled incessantly, leaving Will with the distinct impression that the boy believed that if only he just continued to speak, maybe he'd be able to convince himself that everything was going to be alright. "I saw Brian Saralli… he's dead, Mr. Schue, they shot him… right in the head… he was bleeding everywhere, and Leah Monahan… I don't know if she was alive or not, she was just… lying there, she wasn't moving or anything. Oh God, Mr. Schue… I think she was dead… I don't know what the hell is going on… why is this happening?"

Will couldn't help but watch captivated as his male lead's composure began to unravel right in front of his very eyes, leaving Will unable to come up with a single damn thing to try and help retain the boy's sanity

His heart went out to the boy; it went out to all of his students, really –

It extended towards the ones who had been forced to run for their lives through the hallways of their own high school, stepping on top of their dead and bleeding friends in their wake. It extended towards the ones with not a single clue as to what was happening around them, why it was happening, or whether or not they would be next…

It extended towards the ones who hadn't been as lucky as the rest to have such an opportunity.

"Okay Finn, listen to me, it's gonna be okay, it's all gonna be okay." Will's eyes locked with the taller boy's in front of him as he extended his arms in a calming motion against Finn's shoulders in one final effort to allow the boy to relax as much as humanly possible at the moment, although his efforts merely seemed counterproductive as the teen visibly shook at his knees to the point that Will was starting to become nervous that his large body would physically tumble and crash underneath the pressure. "How about… how about you check up on what the police are doing outside."

He offered the assignment in terms of a suggestion, trying to occupy the boy's mind with something other than the situation at hand, if only for just a second.

Finn nodded, the boisterous young man looking more and more like a scared little toddler with each passing second as he turned his attention away from his teacher to focus on the image displayed beyond the glass of that stupid half-opened window, still dangling outward mere inches as if mocking them in their inability to escape from it.

Will's eyes gazing intently upon Finn's form, he watched the boy survey the scene before him for several tense seconds, unable to help the feeling of hopelessness dancing across his stomach as the teen's face faltered, his features shrouded with disappointment.

"They're… they're not doing anything." Finn expressed his panic, his voice emitting in soft gasps between heightened breaths, but Will had to be completely honest; he wasn't particular shocked by this recent revelation, at least not nearly as much as Finn appeared to be in this moment.

This tended to be how situations such as this one worked; at the very least, that was what he had gathered from his many years of watching marathons of _CSI_ and _Law and Order_ on the television…

In times of crises, the police tended to be notorious for waiting to proceed only when the moment was right for them…

Of course, this right moment, more often than not, was only after enough kids had already been killed, after enough bullets had already been fired…

And usually by then, it was already too late.

"They aren't even moving!" Finn was practically screaming by the time he'd turned from the window, glancing hopelessly between Shelby and himself in search of the answers that neither of them had.

"Finn…" Will was surprised to hear Shelby Corcoran's voice break through the barrier of silence first, her voice being the last he'd expected to speak up in an effort to comfort Finn; especially considering how much she already had on her plate. "I don't think that they're going to come in here."

Her voice was soothing to the point that a soft wave of calm passed briefly through his body before he fully registered the undercurrent of panic behind her tone.

Subconsciously, Will looked downwards towards the young boy, bleeding endlessly from his neck directly underneath him; his eyes dancing between him and Rachel as he emitted an audible sigh towards his seeming lack of options; their final hope fading into impending failure directly in front of their very eyes.

Beside him, Shelby inhaled steeply, her chest expanding and contracting heavily around her rib cage as her face contorted in a manner that told Will how desperately she was trying to plan out their next move.

But ultimately, Shelby remained silent, and although her mouth opened and closed in a series of unspoken words several times, she had nothing; and Will knew it.

"No, no," Finn shot down her apparent skepticism although his defiance had faltered in his hesitancy. "They just don't know that we're in here. We just have to let them know that we're here, that we need help, then they'll find us, then they'll come…"

Will's eyes turned away from the boy, exchanging a lingering glance of uncertainty towards Shelby so that he'd missed Finn's renewed approach towards the cracked window until he heard the teen's voice bellow across the classroom, echoing off of the walls and straight into his very own ears.

"HELP!" The sudden outburst of noise forced Will to cringe in his instinctual fear, his head darting backwards towards where Finn had jammed the majority of his upper body through the small opening in the wall; his intentions becoming instantly obvious as he gathered all of the air he could muster to power yet another pleading scream, "HELP, WE'RE IN HERE, HELP!"

"Finn, Finn, no," Will begged the boy to quiet, the potential consequences of having one of the shooters respond to his bid for help instead of one of the armed officers running rampant in his mind as he rushed forward and wrapped his arms across the broad teenager's chest, pulling him outwards from the window with a single, firm tug. "We can't draw attention to ourselves Finn. It will be okay, they're gonna come."

For a split second, the boy fought, thrashing and pulling against his teacher's grasp, but his bid for freedom only lasted mere seconds before his muscles slackened against Will's body and he turned in the man's arms, looking down upon him with a look in his eyes that Will had never seen expressed in a human being before.

"We have to let them know that we're up here!" He pleaded with Will, longing for his mentor to give him the answers that Will knew, he did not have. "We have to get them out, Mr. Schue… Maybe… maybe if we make a sign, they'll see it… they'll know we're up here."

Somewhere in the back of Will's mind, a light bulb had just clicked on… Why the hell hadn't he thought of that?

"That's… not a bad idea actually." He whispered gently in his agreement, speaking more to himself than he had been to Finn before, in his refusal to waste another second, he released his grip on Finn's shoulders - leaving a set of bloody handprints on Finn's white shirt behind in his wake - and darted towards the front of the room in search of a set of materials that could allow him to procure a visibly noticeable cry for help.

Quickly, he spotted an oversized white poster board lying precariously behind the teacher's desk so that he literally threw his body over the bulky piece of furniture in his bid to snatch it.

His eyes danced only briefly across the poster, the message _Sergeants of World War II_ written in bright neon bubble lettering across the top popping out in front of his eyes – but what exactly it was about Sergeants of World War II, Will would never know, he didn't have the time to linger, so instead, he flipped the poster over onto its blank backside and grabbed the first writing utensil that he found; pulling the cap of the thick, black permanent marker off with his teeth before leaning forward to write his message in giant block lettering below -

"_2 bleeding to death HELP_"

He moved with a rapid efficiency; filling the letters with unevenly smeared black ink so that they popped effectively, hopefully visible to the rows of police officers, two stories below them.

Ringing a roll of duct tape securely around his wrist, Will shuffled his feet as quickly as they would possibly move him towards the windows, positioning the poster with the utmost precision facing outwards, as close towards the hoards of emergency vehicles as he could possibly make it.

With his chest heaving, Will leaned outwards and away from the windows, placing his hands on his hips as he stood side by side against Finn, both men pausing in their success, relieved by their achievement.

Staring intently forward, Will watched, waiting for results so that he couldn't help but allow himself to slip into a steep trap of naivety that convinced him that rescue would be immediate, his eyes gazing unblinkingly out of the window until a sudden and shrill scream originating from directly behind him, shot through his skull so that his blood positively froze within his very veins.

"Will!"

Shelby's voice was high-pitched, animalistic in her panic; so powerful, that it forced Will away from the window and by her side without him so much as acknowledging the fact that his body was moving.

Dropping to his knees besides the two identical women, he ignored the dull ache that accompanied his knee caps connected against solid linoleum and surveyed his eyes quickly across the scene, immediately noticing the fact that something was different here than it had been before…

Shelby's eyes were boring a hole straight through him, while meanwhile Rachel… well Rachel's eyes were once again closed, firmly shut and unmoving, her head rolled limply to the side, her mouth dangling open slightly underneath her slackened muscles as her face began to turn steadily whiter, her lips steadily bluer…

The thought entered Will's mind before he so much as had the opportunity to scold himself for even thinking in such a manner – Rachel looked dead… and for a second there, Will was convinced that she actually was.

"Will, she's not breathing!"

Panic coursed through every crevice of Will's body, but he did not have the time to freeze up, Rachel didn't have the time for him to freeze up, he knew that; so instead, he did the first thing that came into his mind…

Fumbling to gain control of his arms, which had suddenly appeared to have transformed into solid rubber, he lifted a shaking hand towards the prominent vein against Rachel's neck, two fingers groping desperately for a pulse that he never found.

"Okay… okay…" Will muttered to himself, fear laced heavily in his voice as he forced the large knot of bile that had just risen up the length of his throat back down, begging himself to ignore the voice in the back of his mind as it rang in an incessant loop over and over again…

_It's too late_.

"Shelby, slide back a little… I need some room." Will snapped, his frustrations emanating from his pessimistic conscience towards the woman hovering restrictively over his shoulder as he established a firm stance above Rachel's body, prepared to attempt something that he had never attempted before, something that he wished he would never have to attempt ever…

With one final, shuddering deep breath, Will pressed the ball of his right palm firmly against Rachel's still chest, lowering his left hand atop the right, intertwining his fingers to form the steady complex before pumping violently downward.

At the very beginning of the most recent school year, Principal Figgins had decided that it was in the best interest of the entirety of the William McKinley High School district to train every single staff member in the life-saving art of CPR.

At the time, Will had professed the never ending, two hour a day, three times a week class as nothing but a tremendous waste of both time and money.

Now, Will was silently thanking God that it had ever happened.

In his frantic efforts, he found himself pressing so hard against Rachel's chest that he could literally feel the entirety of her tiny ribcage compressing underneath the pressure of his hands, and although he grimaced openly at the foreign feeling, he refused to allow himself to stop, continuous in his desperate efforts to pump Rachel's heart for her.

He counted his compressions, muttering quietly under his breath as he rounded the coveted number thirty before lifting his hands up and away from Rachel's chest, turning to hover above her face as he tilted her chin backwards, pinched her nose firmly shut, and lowered his mouth directly downwards on top of hers, blowing two forceful breaths of air into her ailing lungs, watching through his peripherals as her chest responded; rising and falling in synchronization with his own directed breathing pattern.

Turning back towards her, he checked once again for the slightest sign of life, but still, despite his best efforts, there was none to be found.

He hesitated, hands trembling as they hovered motionlessly above her small chest. His eyes pointed downwards, scanning across Rachel's pale face, her blue-tinged lips, and as much it killed him, as much as he hated himself for thinking it, he couldn't help but wonder if maybe it was time to let her go.

His breath hitching upwards suddenly in his throat, a strangled sob escaped his mouth as tears streamed endlessly from beneath his eyelids, obscuring his vision of the motionless young girl in front of him, the girl whose future had been so bright, so full of success…

It was a future that – as Will was suddenly aware of – lay entirely upon the idea that her life was currently resting precariously within his very own hands.

"Will… Will, please." Shelby begged in response to his hesitation, her choking sobs emitting from her throat with such a forceful vigor that she could barely so much as breathe, leaving Will nervous with the idea that if she kept up at this rate, he would soon be performing CPR on both women.

"Please help her, Will. Please!" Her voice trembled, dripping with emotion to the extent that Will could barely distinguish between the words… But despite hearing her in only fragmented syllables, her implications remained prominent.

His entire body wracked with vigorous shudders as he curled his hands once more, ready to continue this vicious tug-of-war between life and death… He furrowed his eyebrows in determination, curled his lip inward and inhaled deeply in his preparation to breathe not only for himself in this moment, but for Rachel as well…

Raising his arm high upward and into the air, Will balled his fingers into a tight fist, and with a quick utterance of prayer, he slammed his arm downwards with all of the force that his muscles would allow, striking Rachel directly in the center of her chest, wasting no time before repeating the process over and over again in rapid succession.

"Come on Rachel, don't do this to us." He screamed his orders towards the unconscious girl in front of him as he continued pounding his fist downwards against her sternum, feeling as the skin swelled and bruised underneath the pressure of his blows before her ribs merely gave way and cracked like match sticks. "Come on Rachel, breathe!"

It wasn't perhaps, the most orthodox method of revival, but the traditional route had already proven to fail them once before, and as Will's efforts literally marked the difference between life and death, he knew that he had to be willing to take a little bit of risk.

To his right, a resounding bang filled the room, loud enough to block the noise of skin-on-skin contact created in the wake of Will's revival efforts, but in his defiance, in his focused poise, Will refused to stop, or even so much as pause in his efforts.

Out of the corner of his eye, he watched as a desk rolled across the ground with a crash, coming to a halt mere inches away from him upside down and legs sticking out into the air… Behind the fractured furniture, he made out the fleeting image of Finn, sunk low to the ground, face buried deeply into his palms in tears so that he quickly managed to piece two and two together, recognizing Finn's unsuccessful attempt at breaking the glass window currently trapping them inside their own personal hell.

But Will knew that it never would have worked… he just wished that he could have professed that to Finn before the boy managed to put so much faith into a window-bound escape route.

The entire thing had been the idea of Sue Sylvester herself, her active booster club's fundraising ultimately accomplishing the task of lining all of the school windows with bullet proof glassing…

She'd put the motion into the board's mind last spring after a student had accidentally thrown a baseball through one of the windows during his gym class, striking one of her precious Cheerios with a stray piece of glass…

She had marched the poor girl to Figgins immediately - dragging her to his office so forcefully by the wrist that she probably inflicted more damage to the girl's arm than the glass had – presenting to him the miniscule scratch the broken fragment had left behind alongside the argument that even the slightest tarnish in the Cheerios' perfect appearance could be enough to cost them that years' national title.

With the thought of Sue Sylvester deep in the back of his mind, Will's fist came down suddenly with even more of a crashing force than it had before slamming relentlessly against Rachel's fragile body…

But his arm was quickly tiring; his muscles screaming at him to stop so that a part of him couldn't help but think that maybe he should listen.

He was certain of his failure, positive that Rachel was now long gone… In fact, he had just convinced himself that he would only make one last attempt at reviving her when it happened…

His final, shuddering fist landing down upon the center of Rachel's sternum, striking as if he'd hit a button that had been there all along, signaling for Rachel to begin breathing once again.

The girl coughed and spluttered ceaselessly, her muscles tensing in a sense of overwhelming pain as blood emanating from deep within her lungs emitted from her mouth, peppering Will's button down with tiny red specks as her eyes fluttered briefly and the smallest amount of color began splotching back into her deathly white cheeks.

"That's it Rachel, breathe honey, just breathe… Nice deep breaths, there you go." Shelby practically pushed Will out of the way in her efforts to rush back to Rachel's side, carefully instructing her in the method to go about breathing again seeing as how she'd clearly forgotten how it was done.

Rachel's chest shuddered violently underneath her as she struggled to take the deepest breaths that she could possibly muster tears involuntarily stinging at the corners of her eyes as she coughed slightly and spit to the side in an effort to get the irony clang of blood out of her mouth.

Will found himself staggering backwards, stumbling from the scene as he panted through both the physical and mental exertion that had just plagued his feeble body.

Flipping the off switch against his primary senses, he tuned out the world around him as a whole; Finn's shuddering sobs as he pressed his body so deeply into the concrete wall that it looked as if he were trying to disappear completely through it, Shelby's cries of thankful gratitude as she gathered the daughter she barely knew deep within her arms, the echoes of gunshots that Will was starting to believe would never disappear humming incessantly below.

Suddenly, everything had begun to mesh, joining together into one large, hazy cloud as Will continuously back pedaled towards the center of the room, his motions only ceasing upon his grazing of a solid, motionless object below him…

His eyes scanned across the mass, travelling carefully up and down the body of Jamie Porter so that he couldn't help but notice that the teenager was laying eerily still against the ground below him…

He couldn't describe it, the connection that he had so unwittingly formed between himself and this boy that he barely knew, this boy whose life he had professed it as his duty, his responsibility to keep alive…

Scrambling to his hands and knees, Will struggled to drag himself the remaining distance towards the still boy, skating through the viscous layers of blood lining the floor, making the tile slick as ice… Jamie's face had faded a translucent white to the extent that the blood plastered against his skin contrasted horribly against the color, reflecting in the overhead fluorescents so that it gave Will the illusion as if it were glowing… The boy's chest was still, his muscles flaccid, his eyes shrill, wide, forever staring so that Will couldn't help but think that he was staring right at him; judging him in his death for how it was he had gotten there…

It was a valuable lesson that Will had ultimately come to learn; that life was something that left your lungs, your heart, your brain first… but your eyes last.

Will stumbled flailing away from the teen, his heart pounding violently inside of his chest…

Jamie Porter was dead, and this time, it wasn't the same as it had been with Rachel; there was no reversing this, no changing it; Jamie Porter was dead and Will knew that he was entirely to blame.

Guilt wracked each crevice of his body, the weight of his conscience plunging himself downwards into an all time low who's magnitude Will had never before experienced.

He had been so biased, so concerned in his efforts to save Rachel, to save his star that in the process, he had completely forgotten that there was a second student in his wake just as desperate, just as worthy of rescue as Rachel had been.

But now it was too late.

Turning his back determinedly away from Jamie's body, Will forced his eyes away, the sheer fault cumulating within his veins not allowing him to make direct eye contact with the blank, judgmental stare so that instead, he did the one thing that he could possibly think to do in that moment…

Walking back towards the window display, still proudly exposing his homemade cry for help, Will gently peeled backwards the tape he'd used to stick the device to its casing, removing the poster before resting it across the desk beside him.

Reaching downwards and onto the floor where he had discarded the previously used, still un-capped permanent marker, Will leaned cautiously over the poster board and, in two fluid movements drew a large, prominent **X** directly through the number two, replacing it instead with a single, thick vertical line directly adjacent to it.

Silently, and very much so aware of the fact that Shelby and Finn's eyes were boring a hole directly through the back of his head, he repositioned the poster back into its original slot before sliding down the wall besides Finn, clapping the ailing boy gently on the shoulder in his wake, just praying to God that somebody would respond to his desperate call for rescue –

"_1 bleeding to death HELP_."


	7. Artie Abrams

**Hey everyone! So I feel like I'm becoming a broken record here, but once again I apologize for the delay between school and work I've been a mess lately. But as always, thank you guys so much for being patient with me and for reading and an extra big shout out to everyone that's being reviewed, love ya guys :)**

**Anyways just a quick little side note, the next fourish maybe threeish chapters are going to be a tiny bit repetitive just because I wanted everyone to get their own POV chapter so I apologize in advance if that messes with anybody's head. So carry on and I hope you enjoy!**

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><p><strong>Chapter 6<strong>

**The Walking Wounded**

(Artie Abrams)

When Artie Abrams awoke alongside his blaring alarm clock early on the morning of Friday, June 4th, 2010, he, unlike the majority of his fellow classmates and peers at William McKinley High School, already knew that today was the day that his life was going to change.

It was 7:00 a.m. on the dot when Artie was brutally stirred from a previously peaceful slumber, roused in exactly the same manner by which he had been every other morning in preparation for his prospective school day…

By the time he had gotten settled around his dining room table for breakfast, it was already 7:10, by the time he'd finally managed to pull himself into the shower, 7:20.

But it wasn't until 7:45 that Artie Abrams was finally dressed, packed, and completely ready for yet another routine day at William McKinley High School, although of course, Artie already knew that today was going to be anything but yet another routine day at William McKinley High School… at least, for him anyway.

No, in fact, today might very well actually be just about the least routine day that Arthur Benjamin Abrams had ever had in his entire life.

Sure, his mother was going to help him gather himself into the family van just before eight a.m. in order to drop him off in front of the main entranceway of William McKinley High School, just as she did every other morning. And yes, he would find himself attending first period geometry class, followed immediately by second period chemistry, and finally, band practice right before lunch… And undoubtedly he would find himself sitting with his fellow glee clubbers at lunch, eager to discuss the fabulous news that he was prepared to share with them…

So perhaps maybe, just maybe, if you merely glimpsed at the first half of Artie Abrams' day without so much as a second glance, you might be fooled into believing that today would indeed be yet another routine day at William McKinley High School, but if you looked just a fraction of a second longer, just a little bit harder, anybody with two eyes and half a brain could tell that it was in fact more… much more.

This was because at 11:31 a.m. in the late morning hours of Friday, June 4th, 2010, Artie knew that the school bell would ring just as it did every other day, signaling the various students consuming the last bites of their lunches to drag their feet back towards their classrooms; the ending of their briefest moments of freedom cultivating in the exact opposite meaning for Artie toady…

Because today, to Artie Abrams, 11:31 a.m. in the late morning hours of Friday, June 4th, 2010 wasn't going to represent the end, but rather, the very beginning.

Today, 11:31 a.m. in the late morning hours of Friday, June 4th, 2010 was the time that his parents would be parking the wheelchair-accessible van that had been in his family ever since his childhood back in front of the main entrance of William McKinley High School. It was the time that he would carefully situate himself securely amidst the various seatbelts and locking mechanisms that had held both him and his chair sturdily in place for the last eight years of his life.

It was the time that he would be driven across town to the doctor's appointment that he had been waiting all his life to attend.

It had all begun no more than two weeks ago; a man by the name of Dr. Paul Bender had reached out to contact Artie and his family in regards to a series of human trials that he was beginning on young paraplegics between the ages of fifteen and twenty five in his office, a mere twenty miles outside of Lima.

He'd been experimenting with mice using stem cells to regenerate the connections between the various neurons of the spinal cord for the past decade, and within twenty four hours, Artie had found himself sitting face-to-face across from this mystery man, this godsend that seemed to Artie to have come directly from heaven itself for an informative meeting to discuss the details.

By the time he had exited the vast office, he found himself escaping into the sunlight with a new-found hope and an appointment for him to begin his preparations for treatment scheduled for 1:00 p.m. sharp on the afternoon of Friday, June 4th, 2010.

His day progressed carelessly, each passing second bringing him closer and closer towards achieving his most wildest of dreams so that Artie couldn't help but find himself walking on air, so much so that he didn't even seem to mind as much as before that while the rest of the student body of William McKinley High School shuffled lazily towards the cafeteria on their own two feet, his locomotion was restricted to a few sets of wheels and the support of his disproportionally muscular arms.

None of that seemed to matter anymore. A new pang of confidence seemed to ring its way down the length of his savaged spine and beyond, extending straight into his feet so that if he closed his eyes at just the right moment and concentrated hard enough, it was almost as if he could actually feel them again already.

In fact, he had found himself so overwhelmed, so incredibly overpowered by this feeling of indestructible greatness that he found himself poised with a great difficulty in maintaining a concentration on any single outside source, which today included his fellow glee clubbers as they carefully gathered themselves at their usual lunch table, talking animatedly around him about their excitements of the day, all of which seemed to pale in comparison to Artie's.

"Hey, Artie, you're awfully quiet today?" Tina pulled his attention back into focus, her voice forcing his head upwards in an effort to scan across the multitude of faces of his various friends, all conveniently pointed directly at him so that he couldn't help but to think that if now wasn't a perfect time to relay to them his exciting announcement, he wouldn't know what was.

"Actually you guys, I do have some kind of big news that I think you all should know…" He started slow, easing into his revelation as he attempted to concoct his announcement into terms that they would all actually be able to understand before speaking aloud… "Well… the thing is, I think that I'm going to be able to walk again, guys… soon - real soon, actually."

Artie recognized the boldness behind his statement instantly upon the reaction of his friends; a reaction that wasn't quite as he'd expected it to be…

Sure, his single sentence had been laced with a plethora of what-if's and when's and how's but still, the shocked faces slowly turning upwards and towards him, silent in their attempts to process the exact impact of his words hadn't exactly been what Artie had anticipated so that suddenly, he'd found himself scrambling for an effective follow-up.

For the briefest of seconds, his friends merely stared, mouths open and eyes twitching awkwardly as they battled with their inner uncertainty as to whether Artie was being serious in his statement or whether he was just being plain naïve.

"I got a call from this doctor a couple of weeks ago…" He continued in his explanation, hoping that some clarification would ease the incessant glares, "He told me that he picked me specifically as a candidate in a clinical trial using stem cells to try and fix damaged spinal cords… He says that it's looking promising, that I could be walking again within the next couple of years or so."

The small table, previously filled with so much uncertainty became a sudden uproar of congratulatory approval as the collective realization that this idea of Artie's might not actually be as crazy and farfetched as any of them had originally believed it to be settled inward and around them.

He appreciated the support, he appreciated the enthusiasm, but with his head hanging upwards and in the clouds as much as it was today, he couldn't seem to bring himself to stop all of this daydreaming that he had seemingly committed himself to.

Across his mind, fleeting images of him dancing, of him walking just like everybody else filled his head so that the only thing that he could manage to respond with was an empty-eyed, broad smile that seemed to radiate across the entire length of the table before him.

In fact, at the rate that Artie seemed to be going now, it seemed that nothing was going to be able to distract him from the projected greatness of his vastly changed future…

But of course, in what seemed to be a reoccurring pattern in his life, Artie had found himself wrong to assume that his plans could proceed completely unhinged. He had been wrong to believe that his life would finally steer in the right direction for a change…

It was a reality, harsh as it may have been, that struck him suddenly as – for the first time all day – Artie found himself not shrouded with optimism, but plagued with the understanding that today, he had been positively wrong about absolutely everything that he had ever believed in.

It hadn't been the sharp, sudden noise that had ultimately captured his attention but rather, the prominent reactions of his fellow classmates, because it was just so unusual, so blatantly unheard of for a crowded high school cafeteria to fall completely and utterly silent that Artie couldn't help but to glance upward in response to the noise - or more accurately, the lack thereof.

In a gradual progression, Artie recognized the buzz of conversation slowly creeping back towards its standard dull roar; students playing off the distraction as if it had been nothing although the truth was, it had left them all with the same sinking feeling that sent the very pits of their stomachs into a prominent freefall.

"What was that?" Brittney's voice contributed to the nervous chatter, but one of the many curious whispers currently bouncing off of the concrete walls enclosing the cafeteria's perimeter…

But whether or not anybody ever answered her inquiry, Artie couldn't be sure, because his mind blanked, the knowledge that he didn't have the capacity to provide her with the answers that she was looking for allowing him to turn his well-trained ears away and towards the air above the heads of a thousand poised students, listening for the sound again, this time prepared should it make its sudden reappearance.

But just as his fellow classmates had done, Artie also made the fleeting attempt to simply pass off this occasion, discard its importance as if it had been nothing, but despite his best efforts, he couldn't help that feeling of nausea, that pang of discomfort that bubbled its way into the pit of his stomach.

His body was screaming at him, begging him to stand up and run straight out of here so that the only thing that he could think about was that maybe, just maybe had his doctor's appointment been one day earlier, that option would have actually been available to him.

But Artie was trapped, trapped inside of himself so that that nagging feeling of dread continued to linger un-acted upon, only enhanced upon watching Finn jump up so suddenly from his seat at the head of the table that for a second there, Artie had been convinced that somebody had electrified the metal underneath his ass.

"Finn, where are you going?" Artie's ears were cloudy from their continuous strain towards the direction of the hallway but still, he'd managed to catch Quinn's words as she yelled up towards their male lead, who was moving so quickly that he was already halfway through the cafeteria doors by the time the inquiry reached his ears.

"Get out of here." His single, ominous tone was the only response that Finn had to offer as he spoke not only to his fellow glee members, it seemed, but to the entirety of the cafeteria around him, although Artie doubted that anybody truly heard him, the fact of the matter being, even the loudest, the most important words of advice had a tendency to fall mute upon deaf ears when they were being emitted straight from the very heart of the loserdom of glee club.

But Artie had heard him. And as he did so, he did it with the distinct feeling of the world around him beginning to spin instantly upon its axis…

What the hell had Finn meant by that?

Finn's warning had been eerily vague, threateningly uncertain, but if there was one thing that Artie knew, it was that he had never once, in all of his years of knowing him, seen Finn Hudson nervous… until today, that was.

"What?" By the mere tone of his voice, it seemed, Puck had been just as confused towards Finn's shockingly cryptic message as Artie had been, but still, Finn didn't even so much as slow down in response to Puck's beckoning, instead, turning over his shoulder as he ran, he just shouted, even louder the second time around, the confirmation that they had been looking for all along.

"Just do it!"

And with that, Finn Hudson was gone, the entirety of his gigantic frame disappearing straight through the double doors of the large cafeteria, leaving being in his wake, nothing but a handful of very confused singers, and a thousand painfully unaware students.

"He's crazy…" Puck sighed out loud, trying to bypass the fact that Finn's words had left him with as much of a sense of doubt as they had Artie. "It must be from dating Rachel; I think that she's starting to rub off on him."

A handful of their friends chuckled nervously towards Puck's best attempt at an explanation towards Finn's unexpected behavior, but Artie couldn't find it inside of him to be amongst them.

He tried to pay attention, tried to mimic all of his friends and neighbors surrounding him as they laughed, talked and carried on without so much as a hint of worry behind their tones, but that fear, that sense of expectant terror just didn't seem to want to leave him alone.

Before him, all faces slowly began to blur around him, their words drifting in and out of focus so that their distinct features started to disappear behind a veil of budding panic.

He couldn't help but to find himself checking suspiciously over his shoulder every couple of seconds or so, simply to ensure that the cafeteria life surrounding him was carrying on per usual with no sense of suspicious activity prevailing around him…

_One more time_,

His thoughts rang with the assurance that his suspicions were unwarranted; trying to convince himself that he was just being overly concerned due to the heightened emotional state that the day's events had left him with.

_Just check one more time, and that's it… Everything is going to be okay Artie, you're going to be okay, and you're going to walk again, so man up and check just one more time._

His self assurance ran through his head as he strained his neck instinctively, rotating back towards the double front doors that Finn had disappeared out of mere moments ago, watching as students lazily shuffled in and out through them, casually embracing the freedoms of their lunch break.

In fact, there were so many kids cluttering around the entranceway that by the time Suzy Pepper and Jacob Ben-Israel made their way through them, for a second there, nobody really thought anything of it.

Artie saw the blood before he actually heard the gunshots, he processed the screams before he'd actually noticed the chaos, but as his vision began to focus once more, his eyes contracting and clearing of their watery sheath of a tearful fright, he saw it; Dr. Benjamin L. Roscoe, Artie's physics professor, and perhaps greatest mentor in this school, the man who just so happened to be assigned lunch duty on the wrong day at the wrong time, dead where he lay; sprawled across the cafeterias entranceway in a manner that left his body, riddled with successive bullet markings peppered across his torso, blocking the main doors behind him.

His gut sank lower than he thought possible, his eyes dancing between intermittent stages of dilation and contraction; focusing like a professional camera lens on the elongated rifle grasped firmly between Suzy Pepper's sweaty palms, its business end smoking in a trail that lead directly back towards his teacher on the floor; so full of life mere moments ago, now lying motionless in a puddle of his own blood.

His eyes lingered only briefly upon the man before shifting onto the gun… then back towards the man, and back once more onto the gun… Back and forth and back and forth they shifted, his pupils dancing so rapidly within their sockets that he was starting to get dizzy, the subsequent silence that had suddenly and so unexpectedly filled the room only increasing his nausea to nearly uncontainable levels.

Nobody moved. Nobody spoke. In fact, it seemed as if nobody had even the slightest of ideas as to what the hell it was that they should be doing as they watching two of their own classmates ascend into their cafeteria with weapons in hand and an ominous glory on their faces.

Artie hadn't even noticed that he was holding his breath until he felt his lungs give a painful lurch from inside of his chest that left him gasping and spluttering in an expression that emitted much louder than what he would have wished for underneath the tremendous weight of an otherwise silence; a silence that didn't linger as a crack flashed across the still air like none which he had ever heard before.

His body jumped involuntarily in its response; his upper body facilitating a movement that reverberated straight down into his useless legs as he was launched upwards and into the air, solid inches separating the distance between his ass and the seat of his wheelchair before he landed back downwards once more, his eyes automatically affixing themselves onto the source of the noise; the looming form of Suzy Pepper, gun resting casually upon her shoulder, smoke still emitting from the barrel in response to having just been discharged.

But whether or not the shot had simply been accidental or else, a purposeful act of warning, Artie would never know for certain because he wasn't spared the time to linger as the subsequent reaction to the shotgun shell lodging itself deep within the cafeteria's ceiling launched the student body into instantaneous pandemonium.

Screams pierced the very core of his eardrums, still ringing with the echo of a gunshot, noises filtering and meshing along the thick air to create a harmony by which he had never heard before, by which he had never previously believed capable of emitting from a human mouth.

Artie struggled desperately to remain upright amidst the trampling stampede of students, his muscular biceps, toned from providing his primary source of transportation for all of these years, only able to provide him with so much stability as his worthless body was jolted continuously back and forth across the crowd.

He strained his neck as far as his muscles would possibly allow, desperate to gain enough height over the shoulders of his peers to catch a glimpse of any of the friends that had been seated next to him mere moments ago…

But his efforts only ended him in failure, his stature presenting him at a mere waist-leveled height with even the shortest kids in the school, ensuring the fact that the only thing that he was truly able to see was a thousand pairs of scampering legs as they sprinted towards escape by any means that they could possibly think of.

The majority of the students proceeded in a mass, lumbering towards the main double doors; pushing, kicking, punching, biting, doing absolutely anything that they possibly could in an effort to escape from becoming the next target of a mad man's bullet, however the unmistakable sound of shattering glass told Artie that a few strays had resorted towards an attempt to escape through the cafeteria's back windows…

Directly in front of him, a second gunshot rendered Artie's blood, previously cold as ice, frozen solid, but it hadn't stopped there; instead there was another one, and then another one, more and more all blending together so that after a while, Artie lost count on account of the fact that he could no longer distinguish between them.

To his left, a splatter of blood shot through his peripherals as it flew through the air, nearly poetic in its motions as it traveled with the momentum of the speeding bullet that had pushed it from its original source.

The simultaneous sound of bare skin striking the linoleum flooring confirmed to him that somebody had just gone down, and by the sound of things, they had just gone down hard.

Through the smallest of gaps created between the hoards of rushing legs, Artie managed to identify the body of the senior class's most notorious burn out, Rebecca Andrews, thrashing against the floor below, struggling to right herself upwards again as she clutched desperately onto her freely bleeding arm until finally, a small group of students managed to clasp their hands around her and pull her to her feet, practically dragging her out of the cafeteria alongside them…

But just as quickly it seemed, as Rebecca Andrews had been lifted upwards another body was tripped up and slipped to the ground below, striking face first as if there had been an established quota of injured students that needed to be fulfilled to satisfy the parallels of the universe…

Jason Ruiz was a kid in Artie's grade… Artie knew him solely due to the fact that they used to play T-Ball together all throughout elementary school until Artie's accident had sidelined him permanently…

Jason used to pick on Artie because he was scrawny and wore large glasses, but now as Jason Ruiz lay vulnerably on the ground below, bleeding from his face as he found himself continuously trampled underneath the feet of an endless stream of panicked teenagers, it didn't seem to Artie as if Jason Ruiz was going to be making fun of anybody for any reason anytime soon.

His eyes danced sporadically across the cafeteria, mere flashes of the scene before him being the only thing his over-sensitized vision managed to process as splattered blood trails traced the maze of bullet casings rolling up and down the chaotic scene that had housed a normal high school cafeteria mere moments ago.

With each successive gunshot, Artie seemed to marvel in the manner by which he found himself rendered more frozen than the previous one had left him. His brain was shouting at him to find a way out, to do something, anything rather than simply wait for the next bypassing bullet to engrave his very own name into the steel.

But he found himself unable to do so, unable to tear his eyes from the scene before him as he watched the remaining students make one final, sweeping effort to leap through the broken windows lining the back walls while others decided to test their luck by ducking underneath overturned tables for cover, protecting exposed body parts with a suit of armor created from loose chairs and cafeteria trays still littered with uneaten food. Hell, he'd even seen one kid climb into the freezer that the school used to sell ice cream out of…

But despite their very best efforts, it seemed that the amount of bodies dropping to the ground like flies before them merely increased while all the while, Artie was left stranded in the middle, left to wonder whether or not the next bullet was that which was destined to strike him.

_BANG!_

A student's ankle exploded into a cloud of blood, her foot seemingly hanging by a single lingering tendon as she crumpled to the ground below.

_BANG!_

A young freshman intercepted a bullet directly between the shoulder blades, her ever muscle tensing briefly in response as she expelled a single, guttural scream of pure agony before falling limp, face down onto the floor.

_BANG!_

Blood spouted from the sophomore basketball star's hip as she fell in absolute silence, leaving Artie to wonder what it might feel like to run from a bullet hoping for the best but expecting the worst as you were left to merely pray that you held the capacity to move swifter than a speeding slug only to find out the hard way that you just couldn't.

_BANG!_

Artie was only vaguely aware of the fact that this time around, the noise had registered differently to him that it hadn't actually appeared to have originated from the barrel of a gun…

It was only when he'd felt an agonizing pain blossom across his face accompanied immediately by the feeling of blood flowing freely down his chin that he identified the previous explosion as the unmistakable sound of bone-on-bone contact; a stray elbow, maybe even a knee, who knew, connecting harshly with the bridge of his nose..

His stomach dropped, accompanying his bracing for a sudden plunge as his wheelchair tilted to the left in response to the contact, teetering briefly on two wheels before plummeting to the ground, catapulting his useless body from his seat and across the slick floor.

He landed with a dull thud and a small grunt of pain as a sharp ache radiated instantly up the length of his shoulder.

The slight tinkering of broken glass filtered through his ears as his glasses slipped from the bridge of his broken nose and struck the floor below him with a resounding crack that resonated deeply as he scrambled in his attempt to right himself up again, only to fail, falling back against his wounded side.

The noise of heavy gunfire continued prominently behind him as he tried desperately to turn his head in order to see what was happening, but he was blind without his glasses, immobile without his wheelchair, and he knew it.

Using all of the power that his uninjured arm possessed, he pulled himself behind an adjacent overturned table, carefully avoiding the bullets as they flew relentlessly above his head and becoming more and more conscious of the sound of falling bodies now that he no longer held the capacity to identify exactly who they were.

Resting on his side, he pressed his heaving back as far against the table's wooden frame as he possibly could, exhausted in the combination of physical exertion and terror as his struggling brain attempted to process the capacity of exactly what the hell it was that was currently happening around him.

Subconsciously, he shifted his body weight slightly, positioning himself at the edge of his makeshift barricade in an effort to better glimpse at the scene before him.

It wasn't a second later that he'd heard it; the splintering of wood accompanied by a whooshing gust of wind as it brushed past his ear with an overwhelming force of heat, leaving him trembling as his eyes tilted instinctually upward, his gaze resting upon a bullet hole that had pierced the table's wood above him in the exact same position that he'd been resting his head against not five seconds ago…

Spluttering stupidly, the recognition of how close he had just come to death struck him like a blow to the head so that stars instantly began dancing in front of his eyes, laced with flashes of his past, beginning with the slightly humorous image of Jesus Christ himself standing at the gates of heaven, greeting him with the warning – "Welcome to your next life, I hope you came prepared" – before shooting him straight down to hell, and changing with each successive crack of a gun.

_BANG! _

He was in kindergarten, running across the soccer field at recess as he played with the rest of the boys in his class.

_BANG!_

He was eight years old, lying in a hospital bed as hordes of pediatricians and specialists surrounded him, prodding at his legs continuously with their fingers and their needles… but he couldn't feel a single touch.

_BANG!_

He was thirteen and being fitted for a new wheelchair because puberty had struck him like a flash of lightning, causing him to spring upwards a solid foot in under a month so that he had outgrown his old one.

_BANG!_

He was sitting in the nurse's office on his first day of high school, watching through the windows as the rest of his classmates ran carelessly across the fields during gym class.

_BANG!_

He was back in the cafeteria, his shaking, immobile body trapped behind the confines of an overturned, circular table, frozen from both paralysis and fear as the bullet hole lingering dangerously close to his head continued to smolder in its freshly siphoned form.

The sounds of the room were ironically filtering more in their detail now that they were dwindling… The sounds of the footsteps pounding against the linoleum had dissipated completely, leaving behind in their wake only the whimpers of all of the students who had not been so lucky as to manage escape.

Behind him, a single gunshot skewed a shrill scream before fading into an echo, falling ultimately into a silence that left Artie painfully aware of the fact that whoever had been screaming before wasn't screaming anymore…

This was it; everybody who was going to get out of here had already gotten out, while everybody else… well everybody else could merely cross their fingers and pray to God harder than they had ever prayed in their lives.

Tears streamed subconsciously from Artie's face as he wracked his brain, trying desperately to remember all of the Hail Mary's and Our Father's that he hadn't recited in years from behind the sanctuary of his lunch table.

"Hi, everybody!"

The sickening sound of Jacob Ben-Israel's voice, exemplified by the nearing of footsteps forced Artie's stomach into a series of flip flops that left him struggling to keep its contents from spilling out of his mouth.

_Play dead._

The thought rang rampant throughout his mind as more and more gunshots caused his eardrums to tingle unpleasantly, the simultaneous cries of his fellow students making his heart lurch with pain.

_He'll leave you alone if he thinks you're dead… Just play dead._

The tactic was valid enough; he was after all, lying limp in a pool of his own blood with his face swollen and bruised to the extent that maybe, just maybe, upon a quick glance, it could actually pass as a fatal gunshot…

"No, please don't do it, please! No!" The painful familiarity of the voice he couldn't quite identify shot a jolt of panic that burned like fire down his spine, leaving him scrambling desperately to put a face to the sound of one of classmates pleading for his life. "Don't shoot me, please. I don't want to die, please!"

Extending the fingertips of his good arm to a proportion that nearly pulled the joints of his shoulder apart, Artie stretched to reach his glasses, a tidal wave of success flushing across his entire body as he managed to finally clasp his fingers around the frames and lift them to his face, his vision clearing instantly despite the large crack smearing across the length of the right lens.

Craning his head carefully around the corner of his table, the only thing he could truly distinguish was the fully loaded arsenal strapped to Jacob Ben-Israel's body as the mere boy hovered tauntingly over the table that Artie happened to know for a fact had been claimed by the football team at the beginning of today's lunch period.

And then, Jacob had shifted to his left, the slightest of movements confirming Artie's initial beliefs as he recognized the terrifying, spluttering, and trembling body of William McKinley's head gorilla, David Karofsky, as he groped desperately for cover underneath absolutely anything that he could find, praying to God that should the bullets start flying, he wouldn't be the one to be hit by them.

"Please man, I'm sorry, I…" His final, dismal plea was cut short unexpectedly by the piercing ring of a single shot as it emitted from the pistol held steadily between Jacob's hand, his finger flexing against the trigger without so much as a warning, releasing the bullet into an accurate trajectory straight through David Karofsky's left temple.

With his eyes wide and breath falling heavily against the thick air before him, Artie watched in apparent slow motion as David Karofsky's skull exploded like a watermelon, the navy blue Cleveland Indians cap he'd previously been adorning blowing clear off alongside the majority of his head.

Artie begged himself to turn away, begged his gaze to rip away from the scene that seemed to have emitted straight from one of the various horror movies he used to love to watch so much, but he just couldn't seem to bring himself to look away…

Instead, he could only stare, watching with a horrified awe as stray ribbons of skin and blood flew through the air like confetti, peppering the various members of the football team cowering behind David Karofsky's still body as they scrambled in their terror for, at the very least, an aura of safety.

An unnatural scream filtered across Artie's ears so loud, so high-pitched that it physically pained him… It took him an extra moment or two to recognize the fact that the noise had originated from within his very own throat…

Leaping in his alarm, he slapped his hand quickly over his mouth out of the fear that the involuntary noise might expose his cover… But it hardly seemed to matter, his tormentors being much too preoccupied by the frantic football players, scrambling in their bid to escape their clear failure of a hiding place as they simultaneously wiped away at the insides of one of their teammates staining across their varsity jackets.

The various athletes scattered instantly; some staying behind, frozen in their shock while others risked the run, tripping and falling over their friend's dead body as they emerged from underneath the table before darting towards the door.

There must have been at least five or six different guys running for safety, but somehow, Artie had only managed to lock eyes with but one of them, instantly identifying the grief and anguish ridden face Azimo Addams…

He ran in a zigzag, clamoring and stampeding like a maniac so that Artie couldn't help but wonder whether or not his brain had been scattered into pieces in the exact moment that David Karofsky's had been blown out of his skull…

But the broad football player hadn't managed to get very far in his bid for escape… In fact, the way he'd been running, Artie was rather impressed with the fact that he'd made it the five or six paces that he had managed before Jacob Ben-Israel ultimately caught up to him, turning calmly away from Karofsky's body as if he'd just held a casual conversation with the deceased athlete rather than having just committed an act of murder against him…

Picking a careful target between Azimo's shoulder blades, Jacob fired without hesitation, his horrifying accurate aim lodging three of the four bullets directed towards Azimo's crisscrossing frame straight through the boy's spine.

Sympathizing with his cause, Artie watched the towering giant stagger only momentarily in his final, defiant attempt towards freedom, achieving a mere handful of uncoordinated steps before ultimately falling forward.

His body landed with the reverberations of a falling tree directly beside Artie, his pale face and blank, glossy eyes positioned in the direct range of Artie's main vantage point so that it was all the smaller boy was able to see, ultimately forcing him to turn his head away just so that he wouldn't have to keep staring directly into Azimo's cold, dead eyes.

His limbs shaking despite himself in his fear, Artie curled himself into as much of a ball as he could manage, closing his eyes tightly against his surroundings as he prepared himself for absolutely anything that could possibly come next… anything of course, except for the sudden arm extending towards his general direction, grabbing him roughly by the shoulder.

He gasped sharply inward in his fear, simultaneously pushing out the smallest of screams so that the contradictory actions closed his throat temporarily with a painful constriction that literally stopped his heart from beating within his chest.

Fully expecting the suddenness of his shock to come alongside the searing pain of a gunshot, he squeezed his eyes shut even tighter, desperately trying to contort his body in a manner that would prevent him from leaving his most vital organs exposed to the potential dangers to come.

It was only several seconds later after nothing had come for him that he risked a peak, surprised to see that rather than the threatening barrel of gun, it was merely Tina hunched before him, surveying with a terrified gleam in her eyes, the bloody stream still dripping steadily down the length of Artie's face.

"A-Artie… are you o-okay." She stuttered out her inquiry but Artie knew that this wasn't the same stutter that had been produced falsely under her façade of social anxiety, but a genuine impediment of absolute terror…

"I'm fine," He lied, reaching upwards in an effort to quickly wipe some of the blood from his face with the back of his shirt, "Somebody just clipped me with their elbow, but I'm fine… really, I'm fine."

"Okay… okay come on, I'm gonna help get you out of here…" She lowered herself into a crouching position besides Artie, grabbing him underneath each arm before hoisting with all of the strength that she possessed so that Artie couldn't help but grimace with the pain that her actions caused his wounded shoulder.

"No, Tina… listen to me, you have to get yourself out of here." Artie begged as she positioned him into a seated position against the table, the smoking wood still warm against his back where the bullet had pierced through it. "I'm just gonna hold you back. Don't worry about me, I'll be okay."

"No, Artie!" She spoke so forcefully that Artie couldn't help but wince as he snuck a subconscious glance over his shoulder just to ensure that her voice hadn't attracted the attention of either gunman, "I'm not leaving you here, I… I can't leave you here."

She lowered herself into a seated position beside Artie, her actions emphasizing the finality of her insistence.

Opening his mouth in retaliation, Artie couldn't help but pause as their eyes locked, his breathing relaxed as he focused the entirety of his attention onto Tina's hesitant features and welcomed the sense of tunnel vision that allowed him to remove the rest of the world around him.

And, if even for just the split second that it actually lingered, Artie actually managed to retain an alarming sense of calm amidst the chaos.

"Okay Tina, okay…" He nodded slowly in the recognition of Tina's firm stance, the movement forcing his eyes to focus past his girlfriend's shoulder towards where he recognized Mercedes, crouched a mere table away a cell phone clutched firmly to her ear and tears streaming from her eyes; one of his closest friends in a remarkably near proximity that he hadn't even identified with amidst the previous pandemonium.

Their eyes had only connected for the briefest of seconds, but within that seemingly miniscule time frame, Artie was certain that she had identified with his terror, because he sure as hell had managed to recognize her own..

He watched her as she offered him the smallest of nods before flexing at the knees, using all of the muscle power that her legs had to offer to pull herself up to her feet while still remaining semi-squatted behind the cover of the over-turned lunch tables as she shuffled closer towards him and Tina.

Artie waved her back silently, his spastic motions proving to be an inefficient form of communication in his bid to project towards Mercedes that he was alright, that she should stay where she was…

He watched as Mercedes froze mid-step mere paces away from him so that for one brief, naïve second, Artie actually believed that his efforts to stop her had been successful… But it was only upon watching her eyes widen, her spine straighten protectively that Artie realized just how wrong his initial beliefs had been…

From his position leaned against the underside of a table, Artie couldn't actually see exactly what it had been that had suddenly scared Mercedes so stiff, but he had a damn good idea towards the source of her fear, an idea that sent his stomach plunging so far downwards that for a while there, he'd managed to convince himself that the organ had dropped straight out of his ass against the floor below.

Everything inside of him was screaming at him not to look, that this wasn't something that he would want to see, but despite this mental insistency, his muscles rebelled openly against him, practically forcing his neck to twist in order to catch a good glimpse behind him where he saw Jacob Ben-Israel, standing so close that Artie could have reached out and touched him had he been so inclined… But despite his initial shock, Jacob's attention wasn't on Artie, not in the slightest.

Instead, his gleaming eyes glared daggers straight through Mercedes, his pupils running parallel along his outstretched arm positioning the barrel of a gun straight towards Mercedes' exposed chest so steadily that the only thing that could possibly manage to throw off his accuracy was the fact that Mercedes was currently shaking like a tree during a hurricane.

Artie's eyes locked across the scene, unmoving, unblinking despite his desperate desire to close them, despite his insistence upon clamping his hands over his ears, curling up into a ball in an effort to convince himself that this was a dream, that he was currently anywhere rather than where he actually was…

But instead, he took in every miniscule detail - He saw every motion of Mercedes' trembling body, he heard every desperate plea that she projected towards Jacob until ultimately, the loudest noise that Artie had ever heard in his entire life deafened event hat…

It settled even louder than the time that he had been forced to share a room with his colicky baby brother in elementary school, louder than the searing screech of metal-on-metal that had ultimately left him trapped inside of his chair…

Of course, in retrospect, the distinct click of Jacob Ben-Israel's finger pulling backwards the hammer of his Saur 38H pistol, locking the bullets firmly in place to be fired was the equivalent of a pin dropping against a bed of cotton in comparison, but for the intents of the moment, it had registered even louder than any of the deafening gunshots that had been plaguing Artie's eardrums for the past several minutes now… louder by a long shot.

"Mercedes, no!" Lingering stock-still in a painful squat that was supported entirely by Tina's body weight, Artie somehow managed to catch, through his peripherals, the motions of the scrawny, five-foot-nothing teenager that Artie just so happened to be able to call his friend as the boy took a tremendous leap of faith and jumped upwards from his previous hiding place in his desperate attempt to shield his best friend with the tail of the Marc Jacobs jacket that Artie was certain Kurt was wishing was made of bullet proof material right now… no matter how unfashionable that may have been.

But apparently giving Jacob just as much of a surprise as it had Artie, Kurt's sudden actions had enacted upon the gunman, the quickest jolt of shock that forced the finger, already poised against the trigger of his weapon, to contract instinctually, the residual gunshot slicing through the air moving in such a slowed motion that for a little while there, Artie had actually been convinced that time was literally standing still.

Directly beside him, Artie felt Tina stiffen and freeze in her response, leaving the both of them in an uncomfortably compromised position made worse only by the fact Tina's fingernails were digging deeper and deeper into the skin of his arms as her hands clenched subconsciously tighter around them.

Artie felt as if he could have literally counted the seconds between the time that the bullet was fired and the time that Kurt had staggered backwards amidst an eruption of blood escaping unceremoniously across his upper back… He felt as if he could have counted the absolute minutes between the time that it took for Kurt to actually fall to the ground, crumpled into an uncomfortable fetal position as blood spilled relentlessly through the barricade of his palm, clutched desperately against his wounded right shoulder.

His mind racing with a surprisingly still silence, Artie couldn't help but embrace the irony as various flashbacks danced across his vision of all of the times that he'd watched Kurt attempt so fervently to protect that exact outfit from succumbing to the inevitable destruction of an involuntary dumpster dive.

The cloud of the distant memories lingered in front of Artie's eyes, dancing peacefully in his desire to travel back to such a seemingly simpler time until the flash of a second gunshot fired callously from Jacob Ben-Israel's still-smoking pistol shattered his perceptual delusions abruptly…

His flawed reflexes delaying him incomprehensibly, Artie barely managed to process the scene before him so that the next thing he knew, he was watching without warning as Mercedes' face contorted into an expression of pure, unadulterated pain before instantly fading into nothingness – no expression, no emotion, no life whatsoever…

For the briefest of seconds, she retained her stance impressively, her firmness naively allowing Artie to believe that she had merely been stunned, that the close-range bullet had missed her entirely, and that maybe, just maybe she was going to be okay…

But it was within a matter of seconds that to Artie, felt like hours that she finally fell, succumbing to the laws of gravity as it pulled her lifeless body downward where it landed with a dull thud directly on top of Kurt, who grunted audibly in his pain as the wind was knocked straight from his already fragile body.

Somewhere deep within Artie's unconscious thought processes, he somehow managed to recognize the fact that his body had been rendered irreversibly stiff…

He could merely watch, his body physically defying his every insistence to assist Kurt as the smaller boy tried desperately to shift his weight beneath Mercedes', shaking her violently with his uninjured arm in an effort to force her to move, to force her to wake.

He committed to absolutely everything in his power, did anything that he could think of in an effort to bring the girl back to life, but her body was limp, her eyes closed alongside the realization that this was something that Kurt would not be able to reverse… that nobody would be able to reverse.

Moving slowly, Artie's surroundings steadily began to refine around him, manifesting in the form of a dull throb radiating across his upper body that made him all too aware of the fact that Tina was still clasping at his arms with a painful restriction, stilled in the midst of her attempts to lift him from the ground so that his ass was dangling uncomfortably mere inches off of the ground.

Stationary as a wax figure, Artie couldn't help but wonder briefly how Tina's feeble muscles allowed her to retain such an awkward squat before he drew the conclusion based on a mutual understanding that with the amount of cortisol currently running rampant through her veins, she probably wasn't able to feel much of anything at the moment, let alone some mild discomfort…

But amidst the variety of his senses sparking relentlessly; a million electrical signals firing across his brain all at once, it was but a single, physical sensation that he couldn't immediately place that ultimately pulled him back into his surroundings entirely…

It was only after Tina's hands had slipped entirely from his forearms, filling Artie with a sudden whooshing that forced his stomach into his knees that he recognized the fact that her catatonic fingers could no longer function in their efforts to keep Artie upwards…

He slipped into a freefall, a drop that felt as if he might as well be flying from the top story of a towering New York City skyscraper rather than falling the mere inches that he knew actually separated his body from the floor below.

It was the sudden rush of the wind in his hair, the uncomfortable nausea that settled into his uneasy stomach that snapped his body back into focus, forcing his brain to submerge from its previous tunnel vision so that he retained his complete grasp on reality just in time to slam into the solid ground below, coughing and spluttering as he landed face first into the small pool of blood cumulating around Kurt and Mercedes' injured bodies.

His breath caught amidst the center of his throat, emitting a painful-sounding exhale in the form of a ragged sob that echoed across the temporarily silent cafeteria, linking everything together all at once.

Suddenly, everything was starting to make sense to Arthur Benjamin Abrams.

Suddenly, he knew that he had been correct all along in his lingering knowledge of the fact that at 11:31 a.m. in the late morning hours of Friday, June 4th, 2010, the school bell would ring just as it did every other day; representative of the ending of their briefest moments of freedom…

Of course, he could have never correctly guessed that today, this end would ultimately be _the _end… a bitter finality for all of those students who hadn't been as lucky as their fellow classmates still capable of standing back up and walking out of this school, a bitter finality for all of those forced to develop anew around the shattered sense of safety surrounding their old.

Suddenly, for the first time all day, Artie realized that he had been wrong all along to believe that his life could ever possibly retain even a hint of a sense of normalcy…

Artie was never going to walk again, he knew that now… Clearly fate just didn't seem to deem it important to include him in any of its plans; not today, not tomorrow, not ever…

But this bubbling idea, this illusion of self pity merely made him feel selfish, unappreciative, because as he finally lifted his head from the floor which he had fallen out of fear that he would positively drown amidst the pool of blood below him, he followed the trail with his eyes back up towards the cold, lifeless form of the girl that had mere moments ago been congratulating him on being one step closer towards achieving his dream of voluntary locomotion so that he suddenly realized that sure, he might never have the opportunity to walk ever again, but hell, neither would she…

So okay, maybe he would never be able to feel his legs ever again, and yes, maybe he would simply have to accept the fact that movement below his waist was just a distant memory of a past life that he could barely even remember anymore, but at the same time, here was Mercedes, and David Karofsky and Azimo Addams and Dr. Roscoe who too, would never be able to feel their legs, who would never achieve movement not only below their waists, but anywhere else…

They would never achieve their dreams, they would never fall in love, they would never get to _live_ ever again…

Realization sank amidst Artie's insides, lingering deeper than any bullet ever could so that he was left pained with the understanding that yes, he had woken up bright and early at 7:00 a.m. on the dot to a blaring alarm clock already knowing that today was the day his life was going to change…

But had he understood the terms of such a dramatic transformation from the beginning, he would have simply preferred everything to stay exactly the same as it had always been to begin with.


	8. Mercedes Jones

**Hey guys! So I apologize in advance if this chapter has a few grammatical mistakes in it, I've been in a bit of a rush lately but really wanted to get this chapter up.**

**Hope you enjoy, as always thanks for all of you!**

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><p><strong>Chapter 7<strong>

**Define a Lifetimes**

(Mercedes Jones)

For as far back as Mercedes Jones could possibly remember, her number one pet peeve in life had always been her parent's relentless insistency upon hovering in tandem above her sleeping bedside in order to awaken her for yet another terribly dull school day…

Ever since her days at Lima Elementary they had been doing it, and ever since her days at Lima Elementary, it had frustrated her to positively no end – the morning of Friday, June 4th, 2010 being absolutely no exception to that rule.

It was 6:30 a.m. that she'd thrust a tired arm out from beyond the confines of her comfortable cocoon of blankets and pillows in order to slam an angry hand down against the snooze button of her insensitive alarm clock, looking for a mere handful of additional minutes of blissful sleep.

But ultimately, it was a handful of additional minutes of blissful sleep that she would never get, because by 6:31 a.m., there were her parents, just as they were every day, standing before her sleeping bedside as they shook her obnoxiously by the shoulders and yelled for her to emerge from underneath the comforts of her bed.

That morning, Mercedes had opened her eyes with an angry glare already prominent on her face, fully prepared to direct her sleepy glower up towards her parents for their inconsiderate insistence upon rousing her at such a ridiculous hour of the morning…

And that was about the time that things began to get really weird.

Her eyes focused slowly from her fuzzy haze of sleep, clearing against the world surrounding her so that the first thing that she saw wasn't her parent's obnoxiously smiling faces as she had expected it to be, but instead an oversized letter nestled gently between her father's outstretched hands being jutted towards her general direction.

For several elongated seconds, the words merely danced into and out of focus before her very eyes as they adjusted slowly to the combination of sunlight streaming neatly through her bedroom window in addition to the painfully close proximity of the official-looking message displayed before her.

The first thing that she had ultimately managed to distinguish between upon her careful observation of the letter before her was the familiar seal imprinted into the upper right-hand corner of the paper; sixteenth notes arranged strategically within a soft circle, the words _National Adolescent Show Choir_ dancing lively between them.

Her heart pounding almost painfully inside of her chest, excitement coursed through her veins as a surge of natural adrenaline erased any remaining ounce of sleep left inside of her body, shooting her upwards into a seated position against her pillows as she grabbed the letter from her dad's grasp and read hastily, the words that they professed to her with a wide-eyed intensity.

_Dear Ms. Jones,_

_We are pleased to inform you that you have been selected to participate in the upcoming call-back auditions for participation in the National Adolescent Show Choir's 2010 summer world tour._

_Enclosed you will find the scheduled date and time of your assigned audition. We look forward to seeing you there._

_Sincerely, _

_Alyssa Rothschild_

_NASC Director & President_

Her very insides swelling with joy, rather than releasing the series of slurs that she had previously prepared in response to her parents' abrupt awakening of her, she instead offered them a single, high-pitched squeal of delight, her body practically lifting itself up and out of her bed as she bounced across her room, clutching the precious letter between her hands as she danced in graceful pirouettes.

For the remainder of the morning, she'd found herself unable to help but to drift continuously into and out of focus with her surroundings.

But with her impending tryout lingering incessantly in of the back of her mind and the dreams that travelling around the world with the most prestigious show choir in the country would produce for her, how was she expected to have helped it?

What, with the extent to which this company was celebrated combined with the experience that spending the summer travelling the globe would provide, acceptance into this program would virtually guarantee her a successful future in the music industry.

And if there was one thing that Mercedes Jones was more certain about than anything else in the world, it was that one day, her voice would be heard, that one day, every man, woman and child across the planet would recognize her name, they would know her face, and they would know exactly what she had gone through to get herself there.

With her primary goal of the day being to take complete advantage of the bragging rights automatically enacted upon her with the potential of her spending the summer touring the globe with the most high profiled show choir in the country while Rachel Berry would be stuck inside of her bedroom making daily Myspace videos, she had to say that when she walked inside of William McKinley High School's crowded cafeteria alongside the blaring lunch bell at 10:46 a.m. on the morning of Friday, June 4th, 2010, she was actually disappointed to find that Rachel wasn't even there…

But Mercedes hadn't gotten this far in her life by being impatient; she had been waiting sixteen years for this moment to come, so theoretically, she could wait a little bit longer…

She took advantage of the free time, settling herself in a chair between Kurt and Tina at the tiny glee club lunch table, both mentally and physically preparing not only for the guaranteed diva-off that her announcement would undoubtedly result in, but also, for her future auditions as well, the gentle, yet powerful instrumentals ringing in through the back of her head so vividly, that she would have sworn a full orchestra to be playing directly behind her.

_And I am telling you, I'm not going._

_You're the best man I'll ever know, there's no way I can ever go._

_No, no there's no way._

_No, no, no, no way I'm living without you._

She was only vaguely aware of the fact that she had begun swaying alongside the silent masterpiece blaring inside of her head, only vaguely aware that she had closed her eyes against the image of herself standing center stage, belting the powerhouse vocals that she always knew would take her far.

The fact of the matter was, that Mercedes had managed to get so far ahead of herself in her anticipation of the future that she'd nearly forgotten the seemingly simple idea that a present time even existed at all.

It was why she found it so easy to register the very world around her solely in terms of her own unconscious existence.

It was why she'd barely recognized so much as a single noise surrounding her as lunchtime across William McKinley High School progressed as usual.

It was why when the first gunshot sliced distantly across the cafeteria's inner boundaries, silencing it into an unnatural quiet, she had been so involved with the dramatic finale of her audition piece that she'd literally believed the semi-unexpected sound to have been a sharp, realistic snare drum shot echoing loudly in the back of her head, and the back of her head only.

Impressed with herself for her level of such flawless dedication, Mercedes allowed herself to remain completely convinced of her apparently obvious explanation towards such a sudden, sharp outburst of noise for several bypassing seconds until finally, the song that had been playing on repeat in the back of her mind since early that very morning faded away into a harsh silence that followed her straight into reality; her surroundings perceiving just as quietly as the subsequent music had become.

"Get out of here." Finn's warning was the first conscious sound that she had actually registered, having actually heard his words of caution before identifying with the fact that he was sprinting towards the cafeteria doors and towards the hallway as he spoke, an indirect confirmation that whatever it was that she had previously believed to have been all in her head hadn't been… not at all.

"What?" Puck addressed the inquiry that had been on every mind across the length of the table before him so that Mercedes couldn't help but to keep her head poised firmly upwards, awaiting the answers to the incessant questions darting across her brain, leaving her unable to help but to wish that she had been paying more attention to her surroundings than what she had been previously…

"Just do it" Her sensitively trained ears allowed her to immediately register the hidden panic buried beneath the back of Finn's voice so that just as quickly as she had been flattered with a sense of unspoken confidence, buried by an avalanche of good fortune, it was all eliminated in one single, prominent thought –

This wasn't good.

"He's crazy." Mercedes only vaguely registered the uncharacteristic lack of confidence behind Puck's voice as she watched Finn disappear in his entirety from beyond the rounded corner of the cafeteria doors, "It must be from dating Rachel; I think that she's starting to rub off on him."

Her mind faded distantly alongside the dull laugh that followed Puck's attempted explanation, contributed by a mere handful of her fellow counterparts.

Silently begging for her incessant unease to fade into a limbo of non-concern, Mercedes somehow managed to convince herself that Finn's reaction to the noise that she had barely even heard to begin with was a mere overreaction, or at the very least, she had done so enough to allow the soft lyrics of her audition piece to ease back into the space between her ears.

_Darling there's no way._

_No, no, no, no way I'm living without you._

_You see there's just no way._

The only reason that the noise, identical to that which had been discharged previously had so much as processed itself inside of her mind the second time it echoed across the cafeteria was because this time, the harsh, drum-like strike had emitted off beat; a lingering half note, present where it shouldn't be throwing off her concentration so that the thousand students, white walls and rows of lunch tables quickly faded back into her senses.

Annoyance filtered suddenly across the length of her brain, directed towards whoever it was that was clearly trying to sabotage the most important event of her life.

The harsh lighting flickering across the cafeteria contracted her pupils into a sense of focus that allowed her to fall very consciously aware of the fact that nearly every eye within the room was being pointed directly towards the cafeteria entranceway that she had just watched one of her co-captains disappear from mere moments before.

To Mercedes, her perception of reality had been so obscured all day long, so shrouded in a fine line that not even she could truly register between, that the second that she recognized William McKinley High School's most celebrated AP Physics professor, Dr. Benjamin Roscoe, lying flat against his back, sprawled across the cafeteria doors, his torso riddled with bullet holes as Jacob Ben-Israel and Suzy Pepper hovered above him, guns draped casually within their grasps, she wasn't exactly certain what it was she should make of the scene before her.

Of course, the reactions of her fellow classmates, each and every one embedded within their silence, still and unmoving as if captured between the still-frame of a movie, didn't exactly help very much.

Her brain desperate to make sense of this seeming spectacle, faded into an absolute silence for the first time since she had woken up that morning, the music that had, until this moment, been lingering on repeat in the back of her mind vanishing in a manner that sent shivers up the length of her spine.

Taking several threatening steps forwards, the two gun-wielding classmates entered before them, a room so silent that each of their resonating steps produced a slap of boot soles against linoleum so prominent that Mercedes couldn't help but identify with the fact that the rhythm retained a perfect tempo to the song that she could no longer hear in the back of her mind.

The two advanced forward without resistance, performing several staggered steps before pausing isolated in the center of the room, all eyes glued to their destructive forms as if preparing for them to display some sort of epic performance that they had yet to identify as being a black comedy or else a senseless tragedy.

They paused in an ominous matter, the time between the two student' motions growing further and further apart so that Mercedes could no longer ignore the panic as it filtered steadily across every crevice, every wormhole of her body, constricting her blood vessels into nearly painful proportions so that finally, when Suzy Pepper's gun discharged in a clear indication of the fact that this wasn't a joke, this was indeed very, very real, the physical agony that the noise brought her might as well have made it so the bullet actually struck her.

Above Suzy's head, the ceiling crumbled alongside the force of the bullet, stray chunks of plaster falling like snowflakes into the bespectacled girl's hair without her seemingly noticing a damn thing…

Mercedes focused her every concentration upon the girl's empty face, her smoking shotgun as she slung it without so much as a second guess carelessly across her shoulder where she allowed her lingering gunshot to fade into a subsequent silence that lasted but a split second before the true pandemonium finally emerged amidst the crowd.

Erupting with the speed of a sudden lightning flash, chaos broke out across the entirety of the student body, previously segregated within established friendships and cliques, now meshing together poetically into one projected rush directed towards the only exit the faultily designed cafeteria had to offer them.

Mercedes could feel herself being pushed and shoved every which way, the chair below her jostling with the frantic motions of her fellow peers although, no matter how much her brain was yelling at her to do so, she couldn't seem to similarly convince herself to stand up and follow them…

She was suddenly becoming all too aware of the fact that people like her had a tendency to exist with this distinct stereotype, this social label that told the world that people like her were automatically typecast to have grown up within broken down old ghettos in the middle of broken down cities, that they were supposed to be surrounded constantly by nothing more than crime and violence and guns, that they were expected to know what to do when they found themselves in situations such as this one…

But for Christ's sake, her parents were freaking dentists living in the middle of northwestern Ohio, and besides, even if they hadn't been, she wasn't sure that there could have been anything for anybody to have possibly done in order to prepare for this, although she still wasn't so sure she knew exactly what _this_ was, per se.

She was absolutely certain of the fact that had it not been for the wave of charging students flying in a sprint all around her, she would have sat frozen in the exact same chair that she had lowered herself into at the beginning of this dreaded lunch period the entire time.

She didn't understand why she couldn't quite seem to self-motivate herself to stand, to embark on the same bid for freedom as the classmates around her had managed to achieve. She didn't understand why she couldn't seem to process the imminent danger, why she couldn't find it in her to run to save her mortal soul.

But whatever the reason, she couldn't… she just couldn't.

It was only as a large senior boy that Mercedes instantly recognized as one of the burly members of the school's notorious hockey team barreled towards her so quickly that he was tripped up by his own two feet, falling gracelessly so that his shoulder caught the table that she had previously been sitting in, overturning it in its entirety onto its side that she was giving the shock value she needed to move, standing amidst the chaos where she was involuntarily thrown into the belligerent pack of stampeding students and flailing body parts as they thrashed and jostled her, imprinting her with a series of bruises that felt as if they would certainly be nothing less than permanent.

Her feet still refusing to move her in any direction, let alone a tangible one, she allowed the tide to carry her, drifting with the waves until she'd found herself impossibly wedged into a nearby corner, the bodies darting around her rendering her completely unable to commit to motion, even if she had wanted to.

Her eyes scanned the crowd's surface, wide in their desperation to locate any sign of her friends and fellow glee members, but amidst the muddled chaos, she couldn't see them, not a single one…

And with the recognition of the fact that the closest friends she had ever had, and probably would ever have were trapped in a state of imminent danger who's scale not even she could truly process at the moment, for the first time, she truly began to allow herself to panic; chest heaving with painful contractions, eyes watering in her fear as her neck spun upon her shoulders so quickly in its search for her friends that the motions had left her dizzy.

"Kurt!" She screamed for her best friend, the tone that her single syllable had to offer leaving her desperation for a response obvious, however, her voice, usually so prominent, so distinct amongst the insignificance of the rest was muffled, drowned out for the first time in her entire life by the thousands of screams of thousands of fleeing students. "Tina! Artie! Puck! Where are you guys?"

She moved along her short list of companions, audibly cataloguing them based on the order that she had vaguely remembered them sitting around her before the chaos had erupted… But as with her initial attempt, her remaining shouts merely fell upon ears previously deafened by the thundering resonance of gunshots that continued to fill the air after what seemed like hours following Suzy Pepper's initial shot heard around the world.

Through the small gaps between the heads of fleeing students, Mercedes managed to identify the still form of Jacob Ben-Israel, standing eerily stiff directly beside Suzy Pepper in the center of the room. Hovering in a soft clearing, students scrambled to form as large a radius of free space between themselves and the shooters as humanly possible while simultaneously trying to escape through the doorway that their prominent act of revenge had left practically barricaded.

His shooting arm pointed towards the general direction of the hoard, Jacob fired in a nonchalant succession, the only motion his otherwise stone-still body made being the involuntary shuddering of his arm against the violent recoil of his weapon as his finger flexed persistently against the worn trigger.

Mercedes watched in its every excruciating detail as the exceptionally unlucky Rebecca Andrews was struck by two successive bullets, the first piercing her right shoulder, forcing her to reel backwards in her pain as her previously pumping legs collapsed limply, leaving her unable to run any longer as the second bullet caught her directly underneath the elbow with such a force that she was pushed forwards from where she stood, several more inches before simply collapsing onto the ground below.

Directly to Rebecca's right, a boy that Mercedes recognized as being in her grade, fifteen year old Jason Ruiz, hesitated briefly in the subsequent shock associated with having just watched somebody get shot right before him, pausing in his motions for just a split second too long so that he lost the natural momentum of the crowd, leaving his fellow students now pushing against him rather than alongside him so that it was only a matter of time before he'd caught an elbow square against the center of his face with a force that sent him straight down to his very knees below, his nose erupting in a volcano of blood as the students above him tried their very hardest to avoid him but still, refused to stop in their running so that he was quickly trampled underneath the various feet of his classmates until he was knocked sideways into an unconscious heap below them.

There was the briefest of pauses, a second of a lingering silence, so that for a small while there, Mercedes actually allowed herself to naively believe that this nightmare had ended just as quickly as it had begun.

But as her eyes glistened over towards where she knew the two gunmen to be standing, she couldn't help but notice that rather than lowering his firearm in surrender, Jacob was merely reloading it, the emphasis on the fact that he had prepared himself with enough ammunition to shoot to kill as many people as humanly possible prominent in Mercedes' mind.

He fumbled only briefly with the clip of the Tech-9 Semiautomatic Handgun so that beside him, Suzy Pepper assigned it her own personal duty to pick up the slack, taking careful aim with the shotgun that seemed to be even bigger than she was before firing.

The thundering boom of Suzy's shotgun rivaled even that of Jacob's, the sound magnified impossibly above the cloud of screams as they emitted from the mouths of their horrified classmates below.

Mercedes wasn't so sure that she wanted to see exactly, the direction which Suzy's intentional bullet was travelling, she wasn't so sure that she wanted to see what was going to happen to whoever it was that that bullet hit, but for the life of her, she couldn't seem to look away…

The thick shotgun shell soared without remorse into the stream of students, striking a young freshman that Mercedes immediately recognized as fourteen year old Lauren Marley; a girl that Mercedes happened to know for a fact had a positively stunning voice, but lacked the confidence that she required in order to share her talent with the rest of the world…

The young girl reeled backwards only briefly, every last muscle in her body contracting instinctually in response to the pain of a bullet ripping through her spine as the white shirt she had been adorning glistened with a fresh blossom of blood that sent her flying straight down and into the ground where she skidded only briefly across the floor before coming to an abrupt halt, laying so still that Mercedes couldn't tell whether or not she was dead or alive.

She was just squinting down towards the prone figure below her in an effort to catch a better glimpse when a fourth body skidded to a halt directly beside her; yet another student hailing from Mercedes' grade; the basketball star, Sheryl Pierce, who's eyes were dancing in pain within her skull as she pressed her palm into her bleeding pelvis, determination laced across her features as she begged her mutinous body to get up and keep running, only to be met with failure.

There were so many people running, so many students barreling to squeeze themselves through the small set of double doors, that Mercedes struggled to evaluate just how many of her classmates had been injured, let alone the exact extent of the damage said injuries had caused.

But the crowd dissipated with a surprising rapidity so that through the growing space between frantic teens, she managed to identify the majority of the students that had joined the ranks of the fallen, some moving, others not as they were trampled and run down by rushing students, all apparently unaware of the fact that they were stepping on top of their classmates without so much as a second glance in an effort to save themselves.

Her eyes lingered upon the flaccid form of the lone professor lingering clearly dead within the entranceway of the cafeteria as the variety of students pushed and kicked their way outward and into the hall, unwittingly terrorizing the man below as he was dragged like a ragdoll from his obstructive position in front of the door.

A pang of remorse filled intrusively inside of Mercedes' chest, her classmates defiling of such a celebrated man leaving her unable to help but to linger on the disrespect surrounding this entire situation as a whole, no matter the details, or the intentions.

"Hi, everybody!"

The cold, emotionless tone emitted across Jacob Ben-Israel's ominous greeting filtered through their cement prison, meshing alongside the fading gunshots so that Mercedes was left unable to move, more so even, than she had found herself before.

She was suddenly exponentially aware of the fact that the patter of thundering footsteps had dissipated in its entirety, that students were no longer filing from the cafeteria doors in droves, that this was it; everybody who had managed escape had already gotten out, leaving the rest of them to merely hope and pray that if this was the end, the least that Jacob and Suzy could do for them was make it quick.

Jacob walked a slow, steady lap around the length of the room, his weapon retaining its measure of prominent significance from its lingering position between his still palms despite the fact that, by some sort of miracle, his finger chose not to grace the length of the trigger as he blew past Mercedes, propped against the corner like a sitting duck, without so much as a second glance.

She turned her eyes from her young classmate, unable to meet his gaze for fear that had she have done so, she would have recognized the transition that she, as well as the rest of her school had somehow missed of Jacob going from a free-spirited, albeit obnoxious menace to him becoming a positively evil threat.

With his back turned towards her, Jacob lumbered back towards the center of the room, Suzy standing firmly in the doorway – an established guard that ensured that the hundred or so students remaining inside of the cafeteria weren't going to be able to get out without first going through her…

"No, please don't do it, please! No!" The voice, so frail, so high in its terror sent a series of chills through her veins, forcing her to watch as Jacob dropped down to one knee beside the trembling form of David Karofsky, huddled alongside a handful of his fellow football players beneath the façade of protection that had been offered to him by the underside of his lunch table… until now, that is.

With a smirk and a look that could have killed on its own accord, even without the added effect of the weapon between his hands, Jacob terrorized the lumbering jocks, his mouth opening with the formation of words that Mercedes hadn't had the opportunity to hear before a hand clamped down firmly against her shoulder, sending into a spiraled panic.

Her world tunneled inwards around her, focusing on the potential threat and any and all possible solutions she could enact to escape it before she turned, slowly managing to identify with the fact that the perceived danger was never actually dangerous at all.

"Shh," Kurt's voice filtered between her ears like music as she subconsciously released a muffled scream into the palm that he had instinctually brought upward and over her mouth to silence her, "Come on, get under this table."

A godsend clearly sent to protect her, Kurt practically dragged Mercedes by the shoulder over towards the table that they had been sitting at before all hell broke loose, now upturned and resting upon its side, and ducked them both down behind it, their backs pressing so close against its underside that Mercedes was certain that it would leave an imprint of their bodies behind.

"Don't shoot me, please. I don't want to die, please!" Karofsky's desperate cries remained prominent despite the fact that Mercedes could no longer see him, the tone behind his voice practically forcing her to curl herself upwards into a tight ball, knees raised against her chest with the idea in mind that as long as she separated herself from her reality, she could convince herself that this really was all in her head, that this was merely a nightmare that she would awaken from soon. "Please man, I'm sorry, I…"

Mercedes flinched alongside the ring of a treacherously loud gunshot as it erased the remainder of Karofsky's final sentence permanently.

Her breath escaping in a series of rapid pants that burned painfully at her lungs in their refusal to actually allow any oxygen to filter between them, Mercedes pressed herself deeper into Kurt, begging herself to escape to anywhere other than where she actually was, begging herself to believe that there was actually a chance that she held the capacity to escape this nightmare alive...

The continuous screams, so uncharacteristic of the football players by which they were being emitted from, reduced an entire team of impossibly strong jocks into a group of blubbering idiots.

The sound of scrambling feet filtered across Mercedes' ears, freakishly enormous teens running terrified from their scrawny counterpart in a near humorous irony as they quickly decided that running for their lives rather than simply waiting in hiding to die as their leader had stupidly done was a risk well worth taking.

And as surprising as this realization came, it seemed to Mercedes as if the sudden pounding of the footsteps below, the screams of the frantic football team as they rushed across the room, actually enabled within her, more of a sense of order than what the silence had left her with, allowing the terror to slowly siphon away from her brain, leaving room for the first in a series of conscious thoughts.

For the first time since the situation had unfolded before her, rational ideas began to overpower her pure, unadulterated fear, allowing Mercedes to recognize the fact that with the gunmen currently distracted by the charging football players before them, this was a perfect opportunity for her to reach out for the help that they all so desperately needed right now.

Turning towards Kurt in an effort to silently communicate her intentions, she emphasized her motions as she dug briefly through her pockets for her cell phone, withdrawing it quickly before dialing the three magic numbers that she knew solely held the capacity to allow them to escape this ordeal intact.

"911, what is your emergency?"

The operator sounded flustered, desperately busy with what Mercedes could only imagine was an endless stream of calls identical to her own, so that she suddenly was very much so aware of the fact that hers couldn't have been the first emergency call to have been placed from within the walls of William McKinley High School today.

"Please, I'm at William McKinley High School, there's a shooting at my school." Her voice choked upwards in a traitorously loud fashion, emitting in a prominent sob that forced Kurt to immediately shush her before quickly checking over his shoulder to ensure that her outburst hadn't attracted the distracted attention of the shooters.

But the deafening screams of the football team still dancing between her ears seemed to have masked her involuntarily magnified plea for help from those that she didn't want hearing it, her uncharacteristic stroke of luck forcing her to pause momentarily in an effort to concentrate on her breathing.

In through the nose, and out through the mouth; repeat…

"Okay honey, we have units responding to the scene right now," The woman responded with a professional calm behind her voice that filled Mercedes with a surprising sense of warmth, "Police, fire and EMTs are on their way. Are you a student at the school?"

"Y… yes," Mercedes hiccupped, leaning into the comfort of the conversation.

"Can you tell me what your name is?"

"M-Mercedes…" The young diva stuttered over the seemingly simple question, "Mercedes Jones."

"Okay Mercedes," She spoke, using the newfound information to her advantage, "Are you inside of your school right now?"

"Yes!" Mercedes practically shouted in the frustration that the answer to this question caused her. "Yes, I'm inside of the cafeteria."

"Can you tell if anybody has been injured?" The question seemed ridiculous to Mercedes to the point that her subsequent answer appeared to her, to be too personal for her to actually relay to the woman at the other end of this phone call… It was as if the names of all of the dead and the injured, permanently glistening off of the tip of Mercedes' tongue were words too offensive to be uttered, too sacred to be disrespected any further than they already had.

"Y-yes," She answered despite herself, closing her eyes against the various images of Dr. Roscoe and Rebecca Andrews and Jason Ruiz and all of the others that she had watched tumble to the ground in a heap of their own blood. "Yes, a professor and a couple of students as far as I know."

"Alright Mercedes, and what about the shooter," She spoke casually in regards to the individuals who had just permanently shattered the very world around her in a manner that Mercedes almost took offense to, "Do you know where the shooter is right now?"

"They're… they're right here!" The frustration was prominent behind her voice as she addressed the question as if the answer had been obvious, 'They're inside of the cafeteria with us!"

"There's more than one shooter, Mercedes?" The woman addressed Mercedes' unexpected usage of pronouns, leaving the diva to open her mouth with the intention upon delivering a confirmation towards her worst fears before a series of heavy gunfire swept the words right from her mouth, turning them into a painful hiccup that burned silently at the back of her throat.

"Mercedes, are you okay?" The operator reacted naturally to the shots, so deafening that they pierced even beyond the barricade of the phone lines, "Mercedes are you still with me? Are you okay?"

"Oh my God…" Mercedes spluttered into the phone, subconsciously providing the woman with the answer she had been looking for albeit the fact that she hadn't been addressing anybody in particular, "Oh my God, they just shot him… They shot him. I think he's dead, oh my God, I think he's dead!"

Beyond the edge of her table barricade, a set of limp legs jutted out before her, motionless against the ground… But between the angle of the body and the angle by which she was sitting, she couldn't seem to identify Jacob Ben-Israel's latest victim… And for the life of her, she couldn't tell whether or not this was a bad thing or a good.

"Okay Mercedes, I know that you're scared right now but I need you to try and stay calm for me…" The operator spoke with a gentleness that she was trying to transmit through to Mercedes, but of course, that was much easier said than done. "Is there any way that you can get out of the cafeteria?"

"No," Mercedes spoke the first confident answer that she found herself certain of within the entirety of this brief conversation, determined to relay the knowledge that there was no way in hell she was going to be escaping this cafeteria any time soon, not with Jacob and Suzy inside of it anyway. "No, I don't think so… they're standing right over me, I'm hiding behind a table…"

"Okay, what I need you to do is stay behind that table for me. Stay as low to the ground as possible, okay?" She relayed her instructions although Mercedes hadn't really had any intentions of moving anyway, "Now, are you saying that you can see two shooters from where you are?"

"Yes," Mercedes confirmed with a head nod despite the fact that she was consciously aware that her actions wouldn't be transmitted through the phone, "Yeah, there's two of them… they're… they're students here."

"Do you recognize either of them?" She asked, pushing relentlessly for the details.

"Y-yeah, I know them… One of them is Suzy Pepper, she's a senior here, and the other one is in my grade, he's a sophomore. His name is Jacob… Jacob Ben-Israel. Oh my God, why are they doing this? They… they're just shooting at people, and he's dead, oh my God, he's dead, I… I…" Her incessant ramblings faded into oblivion as her eyes danced subconsciously upwards in an effort to survey the scene so that in an instant, her eyes managed to lock with the image of Artie, his wheelchair toppled over onto its side and his body splayed against the ground as Tina desperately tried to heave him upright while still keeping her own body covered underneath the protection of their own table barricade.

"Mercedes are you still with me?" The operator responded to Mercedes' sudden silence, concern dancing briefly behind her voice before fading back into her sense of professionalism, "Mercedes can you stay on the line with me?"

"Sorry… I'm sorry; I just saw one of my friends." Mercedes directed her words to the operator towards Kurt as well, pointing silently to him towards the direction where Artie and Tina were struggling on the floor. "I think… I think he needs help."

"Mercedes don't," Kurt hissed, begging his friend not to attempt what he knew she was thinking of attempting, "Tina is helping Artie, he'll be okay."

"Mercedes, I know that you want to help your friend, but I want you to stay on the floor, okay?" The operator mimicked the warning that Kurt had just offered her.

Pausing only briefly, Mercedes considered this option, straining her eyes to identify with the details of Artie and Tina's private struggle, watching as Artie's head bobbed up and down in response to something that Tina had just told him, the briefest of motions forcing her and Artie's eyes to lock briefly.

Their contact left Mercedes prominently aware of the fact that she had silent tears streaming from her eyes as she studied him, his useless body dangling in an awkward squat that was being supported solely by Tina's feeble arms as his glasses, cracked down the center, dangled by their frames askew against his noise, which was pouring continuous streams of his own blood…

"I'm going to go," Mercedes spoke firmly; the recognition of how much Artie seemed to need her at the moment confirming the necessity of her actions, "I'm gonna go help him."

Removing the phone from her ear, she hastily ended the call before the woman on the other end of the line would have the opportunity to try and stop her.

"Mercedes, stop!" Avoiding Kurt however, wasn't quite as easy as his voice rang harshly through her ears despite being emitted at a volume no louder than a whisper. He groped upwards towards her shifting body, trying desperately to pull her back down and onto the floor as she pulled herself onto her feet, bent precariously at the knees behind her lunch table hiding place, recognizing full well, the fact that now that she was up, there was absolutely no going back, "You're gonna get yourself killed, Mercedes! Come back!"

With a deep breath, she ignored the beckoning calls of her best friend and leaned protectively close against the table before her, walking on her tip-toes over towards Artie, her eyes darting back and forth between her surroundings the entire time that she moved in a bid to remain persistently aware of exactly where Suzy Pepper and Jacob Ben-Israel were standing at all times…

But despite this heightened sense of awareness, despite the fact that she had believed herself to have entered this self-assigned mission prepared, she had been foolish not to anticipate the sound of footsteps as they approached her from behind; a mistake that she had only recognized upon them being directly above her crouched form.

Her body rendering itself positively frozen against the impossible loudness of such a seemingly quiet sound, she found herself suddenly no longer able to control any of the motions of her limbs as the ominous shadow hovered increasingly above her.

She didn't want to turn around. She didn't want to identify the source of her imminent danger, because the hair prickling upright against the back of her neck was more than enough information to tell her exactly what it was, and that it wasn't good… it wasn't good at all…

Slowly, as if being controlled involuntarily by a group of puppeteers, dangling her from a string, her body aligned itself upright, spine stiff and poised so that her posture displayed an air of confidence that her mind certainly did not reciprocate, her body involuntarily screaming at her that if she were about to face death, she was going to do so with, at the very least, an air of dignity.

Jacob Ben-Israel's breathing was strangely even, carefully controlled as he stood a mere five feet in front of her, his empty eyes staring a hole through her slightly shorter frame.

There eyes locked as a soft wheeze slowly began to emit from between Jacob's teeth with each organized inhale that he took, forcing her body to tremble despite her mind screaming at her not to appear so weak with him directly in front of her.

Through her peripherals, she identified the weapon currently linking the two of them together, Jacob's enclosed right hand extending the open barrel directly towards Mercedes' head.

And all at once, all of the wasted hours that Mercedes had lost in the past sixteen years of her life danced in front of her eyes… The hours that she had spent foolishly sleeping, studying, worrying about her future when she should have been singing, dancing, living… the regret of the details struck prominently against her heart now that she knew that she wasn't going to be granted as much spare time to make up for them as she had originally believed.

"Please Jacob," It wasn't in Mercedes' nature to plead, it wasn't in the diva's repertoire to beg for anything at all, but she'd suddenly identified with the fact that right now, begging was the only thing that was going to allow her to walk away from this, so right now, she was willing to beg if that was what she had to do, "Please don't do this. Just walk away… there's still time, Jacob… Just walk away."

But Jacob didn't respond to her desperation, he didn't say anything at all; in fact, he hadn't even made so much as a single indication that he had so much as heard Mercedes besides their dangerously close proximity telling her that there was no way that he had missed it.

Splotches of blood glistened against his starkly pale skin underneath the glow of the fluorescents and the natural sunlight streaming through the windows…

Standing face to face, Jacob and Mercedes' eyes never left the other's, the contact lingering painfully despite the voice inside of Mercedes' head screaming at her to run, made more prominent as Jacob's finger clicked backwards, the hammer of his weapon so that she could literally hear the bullet that she knew to be destined for herself lodge itself deep within its chamber.

Recognizing the end for exactly what it was, Mercedes couldn't seem to think, she couldn't breathe, she couldn't so much as speak to save her own life…

Her muscles tensed in her anticipation, her eyes breaking the contact previously maintained between her and Jacob automatically as they squeezed shut on their own accord so that when the bullet that she now knew was coming directly for her actually came, she wouldn't have to see it…

She guessed that all she could do now was hope that it would happen quickly.

"Mercedes, no!"

Mercedes had been so expectant of the fact that the next sound that she was going to hear would be the air of a rushing bullet spiraling towards her general direction faster than she could ever even think to leap away from it, that when instead, she heard the familiar male soprano of her closest friend, she jumped more than she probably would have had the gun actually been discharged.

Her eyes forcing themselves open, her senses tunneled inward towards a flash of navy blue, that damn Marc Jacobs jacket that Kurt loved so much despite Mercedes' insistence upon its hideousness, so that for the briefest of seconds, she was impossibly blinded by the sheath of fabric in a manner that blocked even the spark of a bullet escaping deep from within its chamber…

The sound produced in response to steel striking skin was horrifically indescribable; connecting with the thud of a dull bass drum, but resonating with the splash of a rock being thrown into a pond below…

The feeling of fresh blood, warm and scattered as it splayed artistically in a mosaic against her skin sent a shiver through her body that extended the length of her feet, all the way up to the tip of her head.

But still, Mercedes felt no pain so that she couldn't help but think that if this was dying, maybe it wasn't so bad after all…

It was only after the scream had filtered through her ears louder than any gunshot could ever possibly think of doing that she registered with the idea that the bullet that had previously been intended for her, hadn't actually struck her at all…

Kurt's eyes were squeezed shut against the overwhelming nature of a pain he had never considered so much as possible before, his arm reaching instinctively upward in order to cover the bullet hole that had embedded itself somewhere firmly against his upper body…

But at her angle, and with the amount of blood covering the boy in front of her, it was impossible for Mercedes to tell just how bad it was, impossible for her to know just how badly her best friend had been injured as a result of her own stupidity.

Her friend fell unceremoniously against the ground below, his body rolling upwards and against her feet in such a manner that nearly took her out at the knees directly alongside him…

But with her final measure of protection in a bleeding heap against the ground below her, and Jacob Ben-Israel cocking his weapon to fire once again, she couldn't help but almost wish that he had…

Temporarily forgetting the details behind the precarious nature of her current position, Mercedes allowed her guard to visibly falter, her eyes dancing across the boy at her feet in an attempt to evaluate just how injured he truly was.

He was bleeding, that was for damn certain. He was bleeding, and he was bleeding a lot, but with her vision clouded with tears, and her conscious mind hazy with fear, she couldn't truly identify with the scope of his injuries, or even with the possibility of whether or not it was possible that he would be okay.

And despite her previous anticipation for the worst, she never actually saw what happened next coming.

She was only distantly aware of the blurred features of the room surrounding her; the image of every eye pointed directly upwards and towards her, waiting with hitched breaths to see what would happen next, the dull roar of a second identical bullet flying from between the carefully controlled hands of Jacob Ben-Israel, the brief, lingering pain associated with the slug, travelling faster than the speed of light, embedding itself through a thick layer of clothing, skin, muscle and bone before striking with a prominent finality straight through her heart…

But as quickly as she had managed to identify with the life surrounding her, she suddenly stopped identifying with absolutely anything at all.

You see, Mercedes Jones had always known that life was the one thing that you could never truly get, that you could never truly understand no matter how hard you tried… And this was why she knew that eventually, you would have to grow to accept the fact that despite having it clutched seemingly between your very fingertips at one moment, it was possible for you to lose it in its entirety the next.

And despite the fact that not everybody is always ready to commit to this fact of life, today, she was more aware than she had ever been before that you didn't always have a choice in the matter.

Now she could only be left to wonder if it was possible for her to ever make a difference in the world when she would never so much as make another sound.

Because Mercedes Jones had woken up at 6:30 a.m. on the morning of Friday, June 4th, 2010 knowing that one day, her voice would be heard, that one day, every man, woman and child across the planet would recognize her name, they would know her face, and they would know exactly what she had gone through to get herself there…

And later that evening, as horrified citizens across the globe tuned into their televisions in awe, unable to avert their eyes away from the terrors being relayed to them via the 11:00 news, and they listened to the audio recording of a terrified 911 call that had been placed mere hours earlier by a budding young sophomore, the sound of her frantic pleas masked by distant bullets superimposed over the image of her smiling yearbook photo, Mercedes Jones' voice was finally heard, every man, woman and child across the planet suddenly recognized her name, they knew her face…

And they all knew, exactly what she had gone through to get herself there.


	9. Kurt Hummel

**Hey, hey all! First and foremost I hope you all had an excellent (and safe) Halloween weekend!**

******Second of all, I got a little (okay, a lot) overeager writing this chapter, which is why it's a million years long but I figured it's better that way, right? Haha. **

**And just one last thing before I promise I'll shut up. I noticed that there's a little character sub-section for ensemble fics (I believe it's under the tag "New Directions") and I was considering switching this story over to that for accuracies sake, but I wanted to take a poll first cause I know how confused I get when things switch over in the middle of everything and I didn't wanna just spring it on anyone. So let me know what you think. **

**Gracias everyone, as always you're loved by me on all levels!  
><strong>

* * *

><p><strong>Chapter 8<strong>

**Fractions of a Whole**

(Kurt Hummel)

Kurt Hummel didn't even remember anymore what it felt like to have a mother in his life.

In the eight years that it had been since he had been graced with a maternal figure, he had learned to compensate for his loss with a complete regression of any recollection whatsoever towards what it had been like at all, the theory being that it was harder to miss what you couldn't remember having in the first place…

So sure, Kurt Hummel didn't even remember anymore what it felt like to have a mother in his life, but that didn't mean that he didn't remember what it felt like to _want_ one.

For being the hopeless romantic that he was, Kurt had almost ruined the moment in its entirety.

"DAD! Dad, have you seen my moisturizer?" His tiny feet pounded like thunder against the wooden staircase leading upward from his basement bedroom as he screamed at the top of his lungs, his high-pitched soprano tone carrying in a manner that made it so had there been anybody still asleep inside of the Hudson-Hummel house at 6:00 on the morning of Friday, June 4th, 2010, there sure as hell wasn't anymore.

"Dad, I can feel my skin drying with each passing minute, I…" Rounding the corner into the kitchen, he stopped dead in his tracks, finding, rather than his small container of overpriced face soap, something else instead…

The first thing that Kurt had actually noticed was the hideous old used-to-be-red-now-faded-to-pink apron tied carefully across the back of Burt's neck, stained hopelessly with crusted pancake batter and frayed with numerous burn holes reminiscent of all of the times that he'd stood too close to the griddle as he cooked.

The second thing that he'd noticed was that his dad was down on one knee against the kitchen floor directly in front of Carole, who was trembling as she clutched onto the countertop for support.

In retrospect, Kurt wanted to kill his father for his lack of romanticism; a trait that he had certainly not inherited from him, that was for damn sure…

And as if that weren't enough, he could have definitely killed his father for not coming to him first with this proposal that seemed to Kurt, to have been as spontaneous as a flash mob in Grand Central Station.

Kurt would have designed this so that there could have been flowers lined from wall to wall. He would have made it so that a string quartet glistened poetically in the background, silhouetted by smooth, romantic lighting… He would have made it so that at the very least, there would have been a change in scenery apart from their messy kitchen floor…

"Dad…" Kurt questioned slowly, watching as his father paused mid-motion in his shock towards a third-party presence, his two hands intertwined with Carole's single left one, halting just as he had begun sliding a ring up the length of her narrow finger.

"Uh… Kurt…" Burt stumbled unceremoniously across his words, clamoring awkwardly up and onto his feet, his hand still entwined within Carole's so that he'd almost broken the finger that he'd just been sliding an engagement ring onto mere moments before.

Of course, Kurt doubted very much that Carole had actually noticed seeing as how both adults were much too occupied trying to play it off as if nothing had been going on between the two although clearly, it had.

And with their faces starkly resembling that of two middle school kids who'd just been caught making out on the couch by their parents; Kurt couldn't help but to smirk.

"What's burning?" From behind him, the lumbering grumble of Kurt's apparently soon-to-be step brother echoed in the back of his head, the oversized Finn Hudson stepping directly besides Kurt so that his towering frame miniaturized the smaller teen impossibly.

But Kurt was certain that despite a seeming acute sense of smell, Finn's eyes must have been still stuck shut with sleep, at least, it was the only reason he could think of as to why Finn hadn't picked up on their parents' suspiciousness, eliminated only by the chaos unleashed upon Finn's inquiry.

"Oh, crap!" Burt cursed aloud in his response to the burning pancakes behind him as small flames began to lick at the undersides of the starch discs, a reflection of having been left on the griddle for what Kurt was certain had been a very, very long time.

His father and Carole stumbled unceremoniously over one another, rushing towards the burning breakfast, now stinging heavily at Kurt's nose as thick layers of black smoke began billowing upwards, clouding the kitchen impossibly so that Kurt could just barely make out his father's form as the older man began prying the pancakes, burnt and singed to their surface, off of the griddle as Carole smacked precariously at the flames with a hand towel.

Above their heads, the smoke detector began to blare angrily, stinging obnoxiously at their ears until finally, Burt had smacked at it hard enough with a spatula to knock the device off of its wiring in its entirety, leaving it to hoot feebly against the floor only briefly before silencing completely.

For several tense seconds, nobody moved, nobody spoke, nobody so much as breathed.

At one end of the kitchen stood Kurt and Finn, standing stock still with arched eyebrows, confused as to what exactly had just sparked this sudden display by their parents… On the other end, Carole and Burt were hunched like teenagers, guilty innocence splayed across their faces as Burt held his arms delicately behind his back and Carole scuffed the toes of her slippers gently into the wooden floor.

It could have been hilarious had the two teens not been so damn confused.

"Morning, guys!" Carole shouted brightly, breaking the silence as she forced her face to glow with a sense of perkiness that absolutely no human being should hold the capacity to possess at 6:00 in the morning.

"What's going on?" Finn asked slowly, his mouth hanging open in his shock and confusion, residual drool from the previous night's sleep still prominent against his lower jaw.

"Burt and I are making breakfast." Carole stated as if this fact had been the most obvious thing in the world, holding up her singed hand towel as a measure of distinct proof towards her statement, although it would have been more believable had it not been for the giant burn hole glistening in a perfect ring around its center.

"Yeah, who wants pancakes?" Kurt's father followed in Carole's chipper lead, piling the burnt silver dollars onto a plate before practically dragging the two boys towards the dining room table where he dispensed the inedible food products evenly.

"Is this some kind of protest to try and start making me do more chores?" Finn asked his mother, poking at the pancake, where it lay blackened and solid, hesitantly with his fork.

"Of course not Finn, don't be silly." Carole assured him, trying to salvage the fact that they had been trying to keep the proposal that Kurt clearly wasn't supposed to have seen, quiet.

"Then what is it?"

"Yeah dad," Kurt intervened, eyeing his father with a look that told Burt that he knew everything, and that it was time for him and Carole to spill. "What is it?"

"Okay, listen boys," Burt sighed after a moment's hesitation, placing his fork back down against the table in his emphasis towards the fact that he was no longer trying to fool the two seemingly fool-proof boys, "Carole and I were going to surprise you at dinner tonight, but I guess that now is as good a time as any to let you know…"

His sentence drifted into nothingness, him and Carole flashing each other quick glances, their mouths twitching upwards in their profession of youthful love before they shouted in the exact same instant –

"We're getting married!"

* * *

><p>"The ring was pure, 10 karat white gold." Kurt fawned over the gorgeous piece of jewelry as he practically floated off of the seat of his lunch table at the mere thought. "It was flawless. If my fiancé tries to give me anything less when I get married, I'm dumping his ass straight to the curb."<p>

"So… does that mean that you and Finn are getting married too?" Brittney asked him, her characteristic display of confusion prominent across her face as she struggled to wrap her head around what exactly this announcement meant for her two friends.

"No…" Kurt emphasized distinctly.

"Jesus Brittney," Santana cut into Kurt's answer harshly, dismissing the boy's gentle tone with not nearly the same level of sensitivity. "They're not getting married, they're gonna be step brothers."

"Like the movie?"

"Yes Brittney," Kurt intervened quickly just as Santana narrowed her eyes into an expression of the beginnings of some wise-ass retort, trying to save the poor blonde from the wrath of a frustrated Santana, "Like the movie."

"Oh, cool." Brittney shrugged with an air of non-whimsical carelessness before turning from Kurt, her interest in him vanishing rapidly as she pulled a small envelope from her backpack and handed it over towards Santana, seated on her left. "Hey San, can you help me with this?"

Kurt couldn't help but to smirk at the two Cheerios, their conversation drifting from his ears as he turned his attention instead upon Finn, his future step brother staring blankly at the wall before him with an apparent lack of interest as he munched absentmindedly on the sandwich that Carole had made him following the whole pancake debacle.

He couldn't lie, he was worried about Finn.

Of course, he would never admit this fact to him. He was nervous that it wouldn't be appropriate for him to be worried about Finn; he wasn't certain whether or not the two were at a stage in their relationship where it was okay for him to hold onto his concern for the boy.

But never-the-less, Kurt couldn't help but notice that Finn wasn't looking like himself today, and Kurt had the strangest feeling that he knew the exact reason why...

It wasn't as if Finn still disapproved of the relationship between his mother and Kurt's father, he'd gotten past that months ago… And okay, so maybe it had been more than a little bit strange at first, but Finn had been slowly adjusting to the idea, he'd learned to enjoy the company of sharing a living space with two additional people, he was getting used to the ideal of exiting within that perfect nuclear family.

Or at least, Kurt had thought that he was.

Finn had spent the majority of that morning's Hudson-Hummel family breakfast relatively silent… He hadn't spoken a word to Kurt as Carole dropped them off at school earlier that morning, and, just because their schedules just so happened to be polar opposites of each other that morning, Kurt hadn't even really seen much of Finn at all…

Kurt couldn't help but to get stuck with the impression that their parents' announcement had caught Finn off guard in a manner that left the towering teen struggling to process the news, but in a perfect world, Kurt couldn't help but wish that Finn would accept this notion towards the idea that they were all soon to be related…

Of course, based on Finn's stringent avoidance of Kurt all morning and his relative silence that had lasted the majority of the day thus far, Kurt wasn't so sure that this was a possibility anymore.

Kurt found himself drilling a hole through Finn's skull with his stare throughout the opening minutes of their lunch period, but the boy's expression was dull, empty to the point that Kurt couldn't tell whether or not Finn was simply ignoring Kurt's concerned glances, or if he truly just didn't notice them…

But the latter notion wasn't exactly likely considering the fact that Kurt hadn't stared this intently at Finn since back in the days where he'd been crushing on the boy so hard that he could barely distinguish between his dreams and reality anymore…

Of course, as their familial status gradually continued closing in all around them, Kurt couldn't help but positively gag at the mere idea of getting together with Finn anymore…

Kurt didn't even hear the first gunshot.

Instead, it was moments later, after the distinct echo of a fading bang had dissipated entirely that Kurt noticed, not the mysterious presence of noise, but the uncharacteristic absence of it.

His head slowly processed the change in the sound level of his environment, conceptualizing the anomaly solely based on the fact that his thoughts were steadily growing louder, clearer in the back of his mind as a result of the cafeteria fading into silence in the background.

"What was that?" Brittney's voice was the first conscious recognition towards the world around him that he'd actually processed; her soft voice piercing through his deep set fog as her and Santana glanced quickly up and over the paper that she had previously asked for Santana's assistance with…

But the only sound that was met to Brittney's inquiry was silence… Nobody answered her, but truthfully, Kurt was fairly certain that nobody really had an answer for her anyway.

His vision tunneled automatically inwards towards Finn; the boy, previously lax with disinterest and dull with boredom was suddenly stiff as a board and perfectly erect in his seat, his widened eyes staring directly ahead of him as his hands gripped firmly against the edge of the table below.

Kurt could feel his heart lurch with a sudden pang, violent against his ribcage as Finn pushed himself harshly away from the table, lingering only briefly on his feet before darting suddenly towards the cafeteria doors.

"Finn, where are you going?" Quinn asked him, her words forcing the lumbering teen to slow only slightly as he swiveled his head over his shoulder and narrowed his eyes towards the glee club lunch table where they subconsciously locked with the first object that he saw; Kurt.

"Get out of here."

Somewhere inside of the innermost depths of Kurt's throat, his breathing became obstructed impossibly…

Had Finn been talking to everybody when he'd said that, or was their eye contact indicative of the fact that he had been addressing Kurt and Kurt only…

Confusion barreled through each one of Kurt's senses as he watched his future step brother stumble into the hallway… What the hell had just happened?

Had Finn's sudden departure been a result of the cafeteria's silencing; an outside source that Kurt hadn't even managed to pick up on? Or had he merely just gotten sick of being in such a close proximity to Kurt after everything that had happened between them that morning that he believed his only option was to simply discard their propinquity all together?

"What?" In a way, Puck's expression of interest towards why Finn was acting so strangely all of a sudden made Kurt feel a little bit better… At the very least, it had left him with the distinct impression of the fact that the rest of his glee club had felt the pressures of Finn's abruptness and it wasn't just him.

"Just do it!" His voice thundered in a tone that Kurt had never before heard from the male baritone, and with that, Finn was gone, disappearing behind the opposite side of the cafeteria doors so quickly that Kurt blinked and Finn had already vanished.

"He's crazy…" Kurt recognized Puck's voice, but refused to detract his eyes from the cafeteria's entranceway, "It must be from dating Rachel; I think that she's starting to rub off on him."

Kurt knew that it was stupid of him to be getting so worked up over this, so offended towards an event that he wasn't even certain was about him to begin with, but he just couldn't seem to help himself so that as the rest of his friends slowly slipped back into casual conversation, Kurt was left continuously looking towards the door, waiting for Finn to return through them with an apology, or at the very least, an explanation prevalent on his lips.

But Finn never came back… In fact, the only people that Kurt did see flushing through those damn double doors were Suzy Pepper and Jacob Ben-Israel so that with a sigh of defeat, Kurt averted his eyes with the realization that wherever Finn had just run off to, he was long gone.

He had just turned away, just convinced himself to stop worrying about a concern that he wasn't even certain of when something inside of him suddenly snapped – a recognition of the visual acuity that hadn't immediately registered with him, the back of his mind processing the image of his two fellow classmates lingering between the hallway and the cafeteria in a manner that made him turn his head back towards them so quickly that it made him dizzy.

Were those _guns_ that they had been holding?

He made the motion to evaluate his own personal inquiry, but before his eyes could properly identify exactly what it was resting between the hands of Suzy Pepper and Jacob Ben-Israel, his hearing confirmed it; a fleeting array of gunfire clouding his brain's every process until he could no longer so much as hear himself think…

A flash of red overwhelmed his eyesight, the unforgettable image of a human body reeling backwards and onto the ground registering within his visual field despite it having been hazed over with adrenaline and fear.

Kurt recognized the man immediately – Dr. Roscoe, the celebrated AP Physics professor that Kurt had never been smart enough to actually get to know personally… and now, never would.

But despite his knowledge of this man being strictly superficial, that didn't make it any less overwhelming as he watched him stagger backwards dramatically, limbs flailing in every which direction as the force of the multitude of bullets that had just pierced his chest pushed him down against the ground below him where he lay still as a clear night, sprawled unceremoniously in front of the only exit door that the cafeteria had to offer them.

Before him, the entirety of the cafeteria fell into an eerie sense of silent, muddled confusion; a thousand teenagers struggling to decide whether or not this act before them had been real, or had been some sort of a sick prank.

Even Kurt was surprised by the alarmingly even tone of his breathing, surprised that while shaky, panicked students before him began whimpering and trembling in their fear, he remained in a collected state of calm, his mind pacing itself evenly, organizing the few options that he had into plausible categories.

His eyes never once left the brooding forms of Jacob Ben-Israel and Suzy Pepper as they advanced slowly into the cafeteria, their footsteps broad and elongated as their heads swiveled like pendulums in every which direction, taking their time in formulating their plan of attack as their guns weighed their arms down with an impossible heaviness.

Kurt considered the possibility of escape. He considered making a run for the exit door, but at the same time, the potential success rate of darting for freedom as fast as his scrawny legs could possibly carry him seemed miniscule, and he struggled to decide whether or not that was a risk that was actually worth taking…

The fact of the matter was that with the only exit door currently being involuntarily barricaded by the dead body of Dr. Benjamin Roscoe, and a thousand other students all guaranteed to be, at the very least, considering an escape route very similar to his at the moment, Kurt couldn't help but feel that should he make a spontaneous dash towards the door, his chances of being shot were much higher than his chances of actually achieving the escape he so desperately sought.

Sure, the windows were still a viable option… But the more Kurt thought about that, the more he realized that those stupid windows didn't even open all the way, that the time and effort that would entail shattering them and then climbing through might make a window escape less likely for success than the front door.

No, the more he thought about it, the more it seemed to Kurt that his only tangible option was to remain where he was, ducked underneath the first source of cover that he could find as he prayed to a God that he didn't even believe in to get them out of this one alive…

Kurt's mind had been so poised, so prepared for positively anything, that when a sudden gunshot finally did ring out, no more than a minute following Suzy and Jacob's entrance, Kurt hadn't even so much as flinched…

But apparently, the remainder of his classmates hadn't possessed a common mindset…

There was a single, additional split second; a lingering moment of blissful silence in which Suzy Pepper drew her smoking shotgun smugly against her shoulder, taking no notice to the smoldering remains of the ceiling tile that she had just shot out falling in chunks all around her, but in an instant, Kurt had blinked, and that quieting sense of calm had vanished, replaced instead, by the shrill screams and clamoring footsteps of panicked students.

And as his classmates swiftly pushed and shoved themselves through the muddled pile of bodies that had wedged their way into the narrow spaces of each potential exit that Kurt had already considered and bypassed, he realized that any potential that he had for an escape had suddenly gone.

He just wasn't sure that he was ready to deal with that fact quite yet.

But ready for it or not, he knew that he wasn't going to be presented with much of a choice in the matter, which is why he knew that if he didn't figure out a way to adjust quickly, he wasn't going to make it out of this school alive.

He hadn't even noticed the barreling senior clamoring towards the table that he was currently sitting at with his equally as shell-shocked glee clubbers until a flailing elbow managed to connect directly with his sternum, jabbing into his ribcage so deeply that it pushed the oxygen clear from his lungs, leaving him wheezing and frantic to control his breathing, already labored with fear.

He could feel his chair tipping sideways in its loss of equilibrium, knew before it actually happened that there was absolutely nothing that he could do to stop its motions as he toppled over, the entirety of the table following suite, leaving him sprawled against the floor, spread eagled and defenseless behind it.

Gasping in an effort to compensate for the air no longer contained within his starving lungs, he clawed at the linoleum flooring, channeling all of his strength into the efforts of his fingernails as he pulled himself underneath the full coverage of the table that he had been sitting upon mere moments before, his outfit staining with its littered remains – residual bread crumbs of unfinished sandwiches, puddles pooling around half-drunken juice boxes – without him so much as realizing.

He paused amidst his hiding spot, the allusion of safety leaving him curled up into a tight ball behind the wooden panel, knees digging deeply into his chest and eyes squeezed shut as he raised his hands over his ears in an effort to block out the overwhelming noises stemming from the world around him.

But no matter how seemingly hard he tried to distance himself from his surroundings, no matter how much he willed his body to fall inwards and away from his external environment, he couldn't seem to consciously allow himself to refuse to believe anything that was clearly happening all around him.

He would have sworn on his life towards the fact that he spent an eternity lying upon that ground.

In fact, he had spent so much time curled up inside of the tightest fetal position that his body could possibly muster that by the time the noises around him had finally ceased, by the time he'd finally managed to unfurl himself and lift his body upwards and into a seated position against the back of his table, his joints were so stiff that he could barely so much as move them…

"Hi, everybody!"

The voice ran his blood frozen in his veins, leaving his heart pumping overtime in its effort to sift the thick chunks of ice throughout the length of his body. He could feel the organ pounding relentlessly against ribcage, its unsteady cadence echoing so loudly into the distance that Kurt feared the revelation of his hiding place strictly based on the traitorous thumping of his heart.

His pupils constricted instinctually, the adrenaline filtering across his body as his head began to swivel rapidly back and forth in his formal lookout for the whereabouts of the two gunmen.

Through the corners of his eyes, he breathed with a heightened sense of relief as he caught a glimpse of a small group of his friends immediately adjacent to him – Matt, Brittney, Quinn, Mike and Puck all huddled in a tight ball, limbs tangled within one another's as they struggled to fit all five of them underneath the small table that they had all been happily eating lunch over not moments before.

But turning directly upwards, Kurt's heart lurched as he registered the catatonic image of Santana, still seated in the precise location that she had been in before, cross-legged with hands clutching at the edge of the table so tightly that her trembling body shook the entirety of the wooden frame above the heads of her five hidden friends.

Her eyes stared unblinkingly ahead of her as she retained her position hovered amidst the shadows where thankfully, Jacob and Suzy had yet to notice her… And as Brittney and Mike tugged continuously at her legs in their efforts to pull her down underneath the cover that had befallen the rest of them, Kurt could only pray that Brittney and Mike would achieve success before Jacob and Suzy did…

But despite their harsh insistencies, despite the fact that the two were currently placing every fraction of their strength into forcing Santana to move, Kurt already knew that Santana Lopez was not one to be easily persuaded under normal circumstances, so that now, as they detracted further and further away from the norm, Brittney and Mike's efforts seemed downright impossible.

Reluctantly, Kurt turned his attention away from the small group… Santana had all of the help that she needed right now, and Kurt had made it his personal mission to account for _all_ of his friends right now.

He had deemed it his responsibility to keep tabs on all of the people that he cared so much about, scattered in response to all hell breaking loose so that, as difficult as it was for him to do so, for the time being, the only thing he could truly do for Santana was cross his fingers and hope for the best…

Heaving a heavy sigh of relief, his mind was put to – at the very least – a sense of ease as he quickly spotted an individual placed directly at the top of his mental list of missing friends.

Mercedes bore a stark resemblance to Santana in this moment, solely in terms of the fact that the unexpected, one-sided shootout had too, rendered her frozen, standing firmly besides the windows, trembling slightly as tear tracks stained the length of her cheeks, her prominent frame trying, yet failing to blend with the harsh white walls as the sunlight streamed in waves all around her – a makeshift spotlight that seemed to be achieving nothing more than pointing Jacob and Suzy straight towards her.

But unlike Santana, Mercedes had found herself fallen into solitude; she had nobody to try and coerce her into hiding, nobody to physically carry her into hiding if need be… she had nothing, no one.

And that notion was what had made Kurt's heart drop more than any other… He knew that he had to do something, and he had to do something quickly.

Standing carefully to his feet, Kurt's knees creaked as he crouched uncomfortably behind the cover of the sideways table before him, prepared to launch himself outwards as quickly as humanly possible, grab Mercedes by the arm, the hair, the freaking neck if he had to, and pull her back to safety…

"No please don't do it, please! No!" The voice sounded foreign simply in terms of its tone, but at the same time, familiar enough that Kurt was practically forced to pause in his motions, his heart sinking to his knees as he turned his head over his shoulder only to watch Jacob Ben-Israel sinking down to one knee, bringing himself eye level with the group of kids cramped underneath an upright table in much the same manner as half of his glee club currently was, gun drawn and cocked, still smoking with the remnants of its last victim.

He couldn't identify any of the kids currently stuck at the wrong end of the barrel of Jacob's ruthless pistol from his angle, but he knew that he couldn't linger, the fact of the matter being that with Jacob's concentration currently distracted, and Suzy peering periodically out into the hallway, standing guard, now was the best, and quite possibly the only time that he would get to safely guide Mercedes into hiding.

But just as he had begun his swift journey to save his best friend, he was stopped once again…

It had been the smallest of shifts, the simplest of motions – Kurt had drifted slightly to the left at the same exact instant that Jacob moved slightly to the right so that all at once, the kid hiding beneath the table currently being terrorized by Jacob Ben-Israel, the one with the barrel of a gun pressed firmly against the center of his forehead was revealed…

And Kurt found himself unable to help but to pause amidst the image of a trembling, terrified David Karofsky, unable to stop the small flutter of his heart that accompanied the notion that finally, his tormentor was beginning to understand what it was like…

He was beginning to understand how Kurt felt every single time he walked into his high school, terrified of every shadow lurking around the corner.

He was beginning to understand how Kurt's heart positively stopped beating every time he saw the towering group of jocks barreling down the length of the hallway towards him.

He was beginning to understand how Kurt woke up every single morning terrified of what was going to happen to him at school that day…

Karofsky's eyes were firmly affixed with Jacob's as he continued to mutter his stammering pleas for his life, but Kurt couldn't help but wish that the boy would risk taking a glance over towards him… He wanted to see the fear in David Karofsky's eyes; he wanted to know what it was truly like to witness his tormentor become the tormented for a change…

And with this idea in mind, for the briefest of seconds, the quickest of moments, Kurt Hummel actually found himself able to sympathize with the plight of Jacob Ben-Israel…

But this idea alone disgusted him to the point that his stomach churned violently within itself; the fact that the image of himself holding a pistol pointed at David Karofsky's head had even crossed his mind nearly making him so violently ill that he was forced to squeeze his cheeks inward and hold his breath just to contain the bile that had risen half the length up his throat.

He practically forced himself back upwards and onto his feet, forced his eyes away from the scene before him knowing that had he lingered too long upon it, it would rob him of his mind completely - and considering the fact that his mind seemed to be the only thing that he truly had left at the moment, he knew that he simply couldn't afford to part ways with it.

He approached Mercedes swiftly from the side, his feet moving with a professional silence as he extended his two arms out towards her general direction, clamping one against her shoulder, the other simultaneously against her mouth to silence the shriek of terror that he'd accurately predicted was bound to result amidst the clash of her tension and his unexpected attack…

"Shh," Kurt whispered quietly as the warm air of her muffled scream sent a stream of mist across his palm, "Come on, get under the table."

He watched her relax underneath his assurance, nodding quickly as Kurt deemed it safe to remove his hand from her mouth and instead, grabbed at her forearm where he practically dragged her back down underneath the cover of the table that he had, until now that is, been hiding besides in solitude… He vaguely registered her release of a soft grunt of pain as he pulled her downwards against the solid flooring, forcing her knees to connect harshly against the linoleum as he guided her every movement, seeing as how she had clearly forgotten the exact mechanism of voluntary locomotion herself, pulling her into a seated position behind the table so that their backs had just pressed back upwards against the underside of the wooden frame as Karofsky's voice once again filtered across the thick air behind them.

"Don't shoot me, please. I don't want to die, please!" Kurt flinched at the boy's pleas, the uncharacteristic faltering of his voice physically paining Kurt's ears as, despite his better judgment, he swiveled his head beyond the table's edge to watch the scene before him, his muscles tensing with anticipation as Jacob's muscles flexed against the trigger of his weapon preparedly…

"Please man, I'm sorry, I…"

Kurt's eyes widened involuntarily in response to the flash sparking from beyond the barrel of Jacob's gun, as, despite the fact that Mercedes hadn't even been looking, he could feel her muscles tense alongside the accompanying explosion, which Kurt would swear held the capacity to deafen ears from miles away.

And in the fraction of the second that the bullet lingered seemingly motionless in the air before them, every single painful, mortifying memory that Kurt possessed of David Karofsky flashed before his eyes like a movie reel – a lifetime of fear, a lifetime of anguish revolving across his mind in a millisecond.

He was in elementary school and Karofsky was practicing his new-found peewee hockey skills by hip-checking Kurt into the lockers with every opportunity he found.

He was in middle school and Karofsky was holding Kurt around the neck in an impenetrable half-Nelson as he lifted the smaller boy into the air with an impressive ease only to drop him straight down into the school dumpsters.

He was in high school and Karofsky and his friends had cornered him in the hallway, vowing that their revenge against Kurt's gaudy self-expression was coming, and it was coming soon…

But it never was, it never would… This was it; it was all over now, Kurt's final memory of David Karofsky forever being the image of a spiraling slug, breaking the barrier of time and space as it connected with the thick flesh of Karofsky's left temple, opening his skull for the entire cafeteria to see…

And despite the fact that Kurt and David Karofsky had sure as hell had their differences in the past, as Kurt watched the boy's body, previously tense with fear, fall limp as it teetered sideways atop his shell-shocked friends lined up behind him, he knew that nobody deserved to die like that… absolutely nobody.

Ultimately, it had been the feeling of Mercedes' body shifting besides his own that had turned his attention from the terrorized lunch table of the varsity football squad as well as all of its scrambling inhabitants, all struggling to pull themselves out from underneath it before they met a fate similar to that by which had befallen their captain…

He turned towards his friend with vague interest towards her intentions, glancing at her just in time to watch her raise her bedazzled Blackberry up to her ear…

For a second, he merely eyed her suspiciously, his expression dancing with confusion towards who the hell she could possibly be calling at the moment… His first thought was that it must be her parents; that she must have been preparing herself to say goodbye to them before it was too late… In fact, Kurt had just begun to wonder whether or not he too should be placing that phone call to Burt, whether or not he should be preparing himself to say goodbye to the father that had done him so well, that had been so good to him until the muffled voice of a woman on the opposite line projected her true identity, causing realization to glisten instantly across Kurt's features…

"911 what is your emergency?"

"Please, I'm at William McKinley High School, there's a shooting at my school!" Any fractional sense of calm that had previously washed across Kurt's body in response to Mercedes' reaching out for help had vanished in its entirety upon hearing the panic behind his friend's voice – a panic that he couldn't help but to have rub off on him.

It was suddenly as if all of these pent up emotions, all of these tears that he had been trying to contain straight from the very beginning had suddenly been released all at once through Mercedes' single, brief sentence.

Tears stung at the corners of his eyes, the sensitive receptors aligning the length of his skin following their path down his cheeks so that he could only vaguely concentrate on his gratitude towards the fact that Mercedes' impromptu shouting had, by sheer luck managed to fall amidst ears deafened by yet another blast from Jacob's pistol.

With pure saline now clouding impossibly at his vision, Kurt squinted his eyes desperately in an effort to keep up with the scene before him, one ear constantly attentive towards Mercedes' bid to bring them all to safety.

His eyes followed the ravished football players, their frequent screams unusually high in pitch as they continued to push and shove their way past each other by any means necessary in an effort to find a route of escape that wouldn't result in their being shot…

But the resultant chaos left Jacob undeterred… In fact, he seemed to only thrive upon the pandemonium, the presence of the fresh targets as he paused steadily to reload his weapon with the swiftness of experience and a look upon his face that made it seem as if he might as well have been performing an action as mundane as buttering toast.

With a sigh of relief, Kurt watched onward as Daryl Santiago, one of the several fleeing football players successfully reached the doorway before him, streamlining out of sight and down the length of the hallway, his escape providing Kurt with, at the very least, the sense that if he could make it out of there, than so could the rest of them…

But this relief was short lived as the reality that Daryl was soon to become the only of his fellow Titans to achieve freedom filtered slowly through him as he watched the star senior cornerback, Connor Putnam slip steeply across the floor, his feet, running in rapid short steps sliding out from underneath him upon his stepping on a discarded Oreos wrapper, launching him forwards so that his head slammed up against the edge of an abandoned lunch table, rendering him unconscious and exposed straight in the center of the room.

Following suite was the trio, Nathan Gilmour, Vinnie Meccia and Chris Basil, banding together however making the foolish decision to brave hiding amidst the dead end that was the cafeteria's kitchens, the ones that the government had already threatened with sanctions a mere month before due to its lack of fire exits, the ones that the school still hadn't gotten around to fixing quite yet.

And finally, Kurt's eyes fell upon Azimo Addams, watching with bated breath as the enormous teenager bid his time; strategically crawling out from beneath the back end of the table before darting towards the door, praying – despite their differences – that what had proven to be a successful escape for Daryl Santiago could perhaps work out for Azimo as well.

But Kurt identified Azimo's efforts for the failure that they would soon become the second that he saw Jacob turning calmly from the still body of David Karofsky, watching only briefly as the football player ran maniacally towards the door, swerving and zigzagging in a manner that made him look drunk rather than simply overpowered by the sense of adrenaline and fear, so strong, he couldn't even manage to move in a straight line.

Without hesitation, Jacob fired the first carefully aimed bullet towards Azimo, and with bated breath, Kurt's heart leapt hopefully as the slug soared straight past the boy's head, missing him, albeit missing him by mere inches.

And suddenly, all eyes fell upon Azimo, hearts stilled and breathing rushed with anticipation as the boy successfully achieved three steps, four steps, five…

Kurt was positive that the only thing that could have possibly brought his hopes crashing down harder than they had already fallen was the fact that he had raised them so high in his convincing that Azimo was going to escape successfully…

Jacob however, barely flinched, taking but a mere moment to regroup himself in response to his initial miss before firing three successive rounds into the air before him, watching with a content satisfaction as they pierced the barreling teenager's back, striking with an exact precision that forced the older boy to immediately pale, pausing completely in his motions so that previously frantic running was replaced with an instant, tentative teeter.

Kurt's proximity had been so close to Azimo that he managed to make out the soft grunt of pain that had been subconsciously emitted from Azimo's mouth… He could see with vivid detail, the boy's eyes roll backwards into his skull until only the whites were left showing, feel the shuddering of the ground below him as Azimo somehow managed two or three more tentative steps forward before collapsing completely, the force of his massive body colliding with the linoleum underneath them emanating like an earthquake around them.

"Oh my God…" Mercedes' mutterings into the phone beside him was a roughly accurate description of his exact feelings as well… "Oh my God, they just shot him… They shot him. I think he's dead, oh my God, I think he's dead!"

Mercedes' voice was steadily increasing in volume once more, growing exponentially loud in a manner that Kurt didn't even bother to silence; he just didn't see a reason for it any longer, a reason why he should silence her voice when it had suddenly became so clear to him that these were the last moments that she would have to use it.

They were dead.

There was no longer a single doubt in Kurt's mind, no longer a reason to believe otherwise… They were all freaking dead.

Closing his eyes firmly, he could feel his chest heaving up and down, the entirety of his ribcage rising and falling dramatically alongside the motions so that the structure beat uncomfortably against the table that his back was pressed so firmly into…

And now that he was forced to face this sudden reality of his own mortality, he couldn't help but wonder what it might be like to die.

He wondered if it would hurt, if the final feeling to cross his brain would be the excruciating burn of a bullet piercing his skin, or if it would happen so quickly that he simply wouldn't feel anything at all.

He wondered if he would be met with the little white light, or else the eternal fire… he wondered if he would be met with anything at all…

Maybe his mother would be there… he wondered what it might be like to see her again, if she would be there to comfort him, if she would be there to tell him that everything was going to be alright.

He wondered if she would even recognize him anymore.

"Sorry… I'm sorry; I just saw one of my friends." Mercedes' voice rang through his ears combined with a quick nudge of her elbow against his ribcage as to indicate that she had been talking to him as well as to the 911 operator on the other end of the phone.

His mind turned back towards a state of conscious thought, he turned towards her, noticing that she had been pointing an indicative index finger directly over his shoulder towards something so that he was forced to turn his head over his shoulder in order to investigate, sucking in a relieved breath towards the site before him…

With Artie and Tina being the only of his friends that he hadn't yet managed to account for other than Rachel and Finn, who he could only hope and pray had managed safety from their positions outside of the cafeteria, seeing them lying beneath the table directly adjacent to them overwhelmed him with a sense of calm that emanated with the sense of a five hundred pound weight being lifted off of his chest.

And despite the fact that Artie had been knocked sideways from within the confines of his wheelchair, and appeared to be bleeding heavily from what, at first glance looked to Kurt to be a broken nose, they seemed to be no worse for the wear, and at this point, that was all that Kurt could truly ask for.

"I think… I think he needs help." Mercedes spoke in a manner that didn't allow Kurt to distinguish exactly who she had been talking to, but either way, he chose to address the stupidity of her intentions.

He forced his eyes onto Mercedes', locking their vision together with the seriousness of his glare before placing an expression upon his face that told her just how bad an idea he knew her plans to be right now.

"Mercedes don't," Kurt hissed, understanding that despite the fact that his words sounded harsh, despite the fact that he presented as if he didn't care about his two friends; his hesitation towards providing them with assistance was merely based on his true belief that right now, staying put was what was best for them all.

Because within this cafeteria, as it quickly fell still and silent all around them, the watchful eyes of Jacob Ben-Israel and Suzy Pepper scanning for the slightest indication of movement, Kurt knew that Mercedes so much as crawling the ten feet separating them from Artie and Tina was enough to attract their unwanted attention.

Besides, Tina was there with Artie, and Kurt knew that Tina was more than qualified to care for him. Tina would make sure that nothing bad would happen to him…

"I'm going to go. I'm gonna go help him." Mercedes merely shook her head towards his hesitation, pure determination written across the every length of her features as she discarded her cell phone and lifted her body into an impressive squat that left her no taller than what she had been when she'd been seated, still safely guarded by the table in front of her as she began slowly goose stepping towards Artie and Tina.

"Mercedes, stop!" Kurt hissed his quiet demand, making a desperate lunge to grab for her… But his palms had suddenly become so slippery, so slick with his own sweat that Mercedes slipped easily from his grasp, quickly removing herself to beyond an arm's length away from Kurt, leaving him to his useless methods of verbal persuasion to try and turn his friend around again before it was too late.

"You're gonna get yourself killed, Mercedes! Come back!"

But Mercedes simply continued to disregard his calls, continued to act as if she hadn't even heard him as she trudged forward, advancing closer and closer towards Artie and Tina with every step she took and further and further from Kurt, as well as that façade of safety that they had somehow managed to establish.

"Oh God… Oh my God," Kurt muttered under his breath, slowly beginning to hyperventilate as silent tears streaked the length of his cheeks.

His heightened senses kept him alerted to Jacob and Suzy's every movement, allowing him to easily register the swiftness in their steps as they strode past the bodies littering the floor in layers – pausing every couple of feet to evaluate the bullet holes that had since turned mere students into sieves.

To Kurt's direct right, he flinched as Jacob's foot rolled prominently downwards against a discarded yogurt cup, the hard plastic crunching with resound beneath his foot.

Jacob was so close that Kurt could actually see the surprisingly thick muscles lining across his upper back rise and fall prominently with each motion of his lungs as Jacob took several deep, steadying breaths before lowering his semi-automatic weapon to his side, picking up an abandoned cup of soda resting against a lunch tray so that he could take a sip, warding off the offending cottonmouth that Kurt was certain must come hand-in-hand with the adrenaline rush of mass murder.

He took a single, deep gulp before allowing the Styrofoam glass to slip from between his hands, landing against the floor with a splash as the residual beverage scattered across the floor alongside half-melted ice cubes…

And finally, no longer able to watch Jacob as he rounded the cafeteria, progressing with a horrifying air of normalcy, Kurt squeezed his eyes shut firmly, feeling as the tears forced their way between his tightly sealed eyelids where they rolled down his cheeks before plummeting in a suicidal free fall off of his chin and onto his prized outfit below.

The first thing that he was made aware of upon his abrupt departure with reality was the shifting of the light before him – bright fluorescents, previously beating powerfully downward, even behind closed eyelids, rapidly blocked with a painful suddenness, replaced only by a shadow that left Kurt trembling with the recognition of the fact that this could have only be caused by one thing, and one thing only…

"Please Jacob," The sound of Mercedes' voice, uncharacteristically vulnerable despite the girl's sharp personality forced Kurt's eyes to open on their own accord, forced him to peer outwards from beyond his hiding place, risking his own exposure in an attempt to identify the extent of the mess that Mercedes had just gotten herself into, and a solution as to how to get her out of it. "Please don't do this. Just walk away… there's still time, Jacob. Just walk away."

Kurt's breath had fallen ragged and irregular, his mind racing blindly so that suddenly, he couldn't seem to manage a single, distinct thought… he couldn't seem to find a solution that would get Mercedes, that would get any of them, out of this mess alive.

He had to act; at the very least, he had managed to identify with that much… He had to act, he had to save his best friend…

He just wasn't sure that he knew exactly how to do that.

Quickly and carefully, he studied Jacob Ben-Israel's brooding form, his empty eyes, his pale face sprinkled with evidence of his rampage in the form of glistening droplets of blood positively sparkling against milky white skin…

But Kurt couldn't help but be left with the impression that Jacob hadn't heard a single damn thing that Mercedes had just said to him… And the more he thought about it, the more he realized that actually, he probably hadn't.

Jacob's brain was on autopilot, that much Kurt was now certain of. His mind had dismissed itself from reality in its entirety, his muscles left to involuntarily control in order to commit to the acts of murder he never would have held the capacity to perform had he allowed himself to linger too heavily on the consequences.

And suddenly, Kurt knew that if he was going to have any chance of saving Mercedes, of saving any of them, he was going to have to do the same thing. He was going to have to release himself from the confines of the world; he was going to have to do what he had to without so much as thinking about it beforehand.

He, like Jacob, couldn't linger on the potential consequences of his actions, or else they would never get done.

But this was a task that he knew would be easier said than done as, for the first time in his entire life, he begged himself to fall into the mindset of Jacob Ben-Israel, begged himself to become completely and utterly empty on the inside.

And with the idea of becoming just like Jacob in mind, he suddenly knew exactly just what he had to do; he knew exactly how it was that he would distance himself with his reality… All he had to do was employ the tactics that he had since mastered, the tactics that kids like himself, as well as Jacob Ben-Israel learn become instinct alongside daily torment.

He considered all of the times him and Jacob had laid side by side amidst the trash within the school dumpsters.

He considered all of the times he had been driven into a locker so hard, it would leave him with bruises up and down the lengths of his arms, Jacob meeting a similar fate directly across the hall.

He considered every time him and Jacob had been in close enough proximity to each other to leave the football team free to grab at them, smashing their miniscule bodies into each other so that their heads collided painfully… And just as the stars, indicative of an obvious concussion, began to clear, he always just managed to make out the jocks yelling "homos" at them from down the length of the hall.

So what had been Jacob's final straw? Why this, why now after so many years of incessant torment that Kurt never believed to have been any worse than what he had experienced, had Jacob Ben-Israel decided to walk into their high school this morning with a gun in his hand and not him?

In his bid to place distance between his physical and mental being, he found the innermost workings of his mind being tested beyond the concept of rational thought, being stuck beneath an overturned table with his life flashing before his eyes and his mind racing with the wonderment of how much time he would be granted to remain on this Earth offering him an overwhelmingly unique perspective on life.

He couldn't help but to explore all of the what-if's, the why not's… But the more he thought about it, the less he seemed to find himself able to rationalize what Jacob and Suzy had done today… No matter how hard he tried, no matter how much he had been through within the very walls of this high school, he just couldn't picture himself in their position, couldn't picture perceiving things as so bad that he would have to resort to this.

And with this thought in mind, he finally achieved success in relaxing his mind into that separated state that he had so desired; and with the idea in mind that there was absolutely no way in hell that he could ever be a killer, he decided to solidify that fact by turning into a hero instead.

"Mercedes, no!"

Motivated not by the similarities between him and Jacob, but instead by the differences, he lifted himself to his feet, his body moving entirely on its own accord as he sprawled his arms outwards, exposing the entirety of his wingspan in an effort to protect Mercedes, shielding her behind his body.

But unfortunately, beyond this one spontaneous action, Kurt hadn't really considered his need for a follow up. In fact, besides turning his body into a human shield, he had found himself completely at a loss for ideas, a factor that he clearly hadn't anticipated on until he found himself standing face-to-face in front of Jacob's loaded, cocked pistol, ready to fire and aimed directly at his head.

And as counterproductive as the action may have seemed, the only thing that he could actually think to do was to shut his eyes… so that was exactly what he did.

With his vision barred from the physical presence of an outside world and his brain cycling with the colors of sound, his remaining senses became magnified, his hearing poised and prepared so that when he finally did hear the booming gunshot, releasing the bullet he knew to be designated for him, his body was already prepared for it.

He could feel – in its every excruciating detail – the motions of the bullet as it worked its way beneath his skin. He could feel, as if in slow motion and with an obscure fascination, the aerodynamically carved framework tunnel its way through the caravans of muscle and bone surrounding the girth of his right shoulder, digging deep before escaping, in its bid for freedom, out of the other side, straight through his shoulder blade.

And yet still, he didn't feel any pain.

He knew that he had just been shot, he knew that a bullet had just ripped straight through his body, leaving an untold amount of damage behind, but despite all of this, there was absolutely no pain.

Endorphins flooded through his veins, fogging the receptors with a layer of haze that left him feeling weightless, blissful, almost high…

For a split second, he staggered into this feeling, swaying slightly on his feet as the blood puddled around him, staining a prominent circle against his favorite outfit although he didn't seem to care. Suddenly, none of that seemed to matter, he didn't need clothes anymore; he was warm, he was comfortable, he was downright cozy.

His legs giving out from underneath him was ultimately what brought him back into his harsh reality, his body adjusting to the temporary rush of its natural pain killers so that the throbbing finally stuck him like a truck, so harsh, so intense that his vision faded into a screen of pure white, his surroundings perceived as mere shadows as his body attempted to suck in a shuddering breath only to fail, leaving him coughing and sputtering for air.

Instinctually, he lifted his left arm to cover his injured right, the feeling of blood seeping between the cracks between his fingers standing out even beyond his overwhelming agony, leaving him to gag despite himself, the contents of his stomach churning threateningly as the metallic scent of blood travelled from his nose to the back of his throat so that he could literally taste it.

He had almost forgotten why he had chosen to throw himself into such a stupidly dangerous situation, why he had endured this suicide mission to begin with until the sound of a second gunshot, the whoosh of air as a body was sent barreling downwards, the sickening thud as it landed harshly on top of his own reminded him.

Some hero he had turned out to be – how typical.

His eyes tearing to the point that he could no longer see, he coughed and spluttered as he directed all of the strength that his muscles still possessed into his uninjured arm in an effort to try and coax Mercedes off of him, to try and convince her that she needed to move, that he couldn't breathe underneath her weight.

But she was limp above his trapped limbs, deaf to any pleas that he made with her… But it wasn't until he finally managed to shift the entirety of her body weight away from him and sucked in a deep breath of air that left his eyes tearing with relief that he truly realized exactly what that meant for Mercedes…

He never believed it possible for a human being to look that pale, that still, that silent, but there she was; white as a sheet, lips already tinted in an impossibly deep shade of blue, stiff and unmoving as she lingered in a silence that somehow registered to Kurt as being the loudest nose that he had ever heard in his entire life.

He could feel her warm blood, that precious liquid dripping freely from her body, robbing it of all of its color, all of its life, pooling heavily against his skin and combining with his own in a manner that created a puddle that managed to seep across two layers of clothing, an undershirt, and, Kurt would swear upon his life, his skin itself.

But ultimately, it was her eyes that had truly gotten to him; it was her eyes that finally forced his head away, unable to look for fear that if he allowed himself to get trapped inside of her infinite stare, after a while, he would begin to see the blame inside of them regarding his inability to save her.

"M… Mercedes…" He stuttered, his single word emitting as a choked sob as he begged his best friend for a response that he knew he was never going to actually get.

"Mercedes, please!" He shouted again, no longer concerned with the idea of who could hear him, or what they would do in response…

With a newfound strength, he shook the girl resting on top of him as hard as he possibly could, but his every effort was met with a limited success, her only movement being that of her flaccid limbs, rolling like a ragdoll in response to Kurt's shoves so that eventually, just as Kurt's muscles began to burn in protest, he was left to merely accept the fact that no matter how hard he pushed her, no matter how hard he yelled at her, Mercedes wasn't coming back.

Tears sprang upwards and into his eyes, his lungs starving for air once more as he choked on the combination of blood, saliva and shock currently restricting his windpipe impossibly; a panic attack resultant of sheer guilt.

His vision began blackening rapidly, his world closing in all around him; but this time, instead of fighting the darkness, he chose instead to welcome it, his thoughts comforted with the idea that wherever it was that he was going, maybe he would see Mercedes again, maybe he would have the opportunity to tell her how truly sorry he was, how he had never meant for things to happen this way…

He wanted, no he _needed_ to let her know that he had never intended on her becoming a living and breathing example of an idea that he had known of all along; the idea that working harder in life only leaves you to fall even harder…

Until finally, you find yourself losing absolutely everything that you have ever truly loved to begin with so that other than your own personal vices, you find yourself left without a single goddamned thing at all.


	10. Santana & Brittney

**Chapter 9**

**On Love, On Life**

(Santana & Brittney)

"Hey San, can you help me with this?"

Brittney shrugged her attention casually away from the form of Kurt Hummel seated at her left, turning instead towards her opposing side where she dangled before Santana Lopez a prominent envelope that she had found waiting for her inside of her mailbox that morning, an envelope that she had been struggling to make heads or tails out of ever since her locating of it.

"Yeah," Santana replied, using the back of her hand to wipe the remnants of her half-eaten sandwich from her mouth before extending it in order to retrieve the envelope. "What is it?"

"I got it in the mail this morning." Brittney explained, watching as her best friend peeled back the letter's lid before carefully extracting its contents. "It's something about sitting."

"Sitting?" Santana questioned suspiciously, glancing upwards and over the top of the mysterious paper in order to shoot a confusedly arched eyebrow towards Brittney's general direction.

"Yeah, it said sat on it." Brittney confirmed, nodding her head towards the familiar S.A.T. logo emblazoned across the envelope's upper left hand corner so that suddenly, for Santana, things became much clearer.

"Don't you mean S.A.T., Britt?" Santana asked in her attempt to reason with the girl before her.

"Yeah," Brittney spoke in a matter-of-fact tone as if this was what she had been trying to convey this entire time. "That's how you spell sat, duh."

"Oh, Dios mío…" Santana sighed in her native Spanish, rolling her eyes prominently as she begged herself to make use of the deep breathing exercises that she had always found allowed her to carry herself through any conversation with Brittney. "No Brittney, that test that we took last month… Don't you remember? The day that you had to wake up early on a Saturday morning…"

"No…"

"It was the same day that you had to take Lord Tubbington to the vet because he ate all of your cotton balls." Santana explained slowly in terms that she knew that Brittney would understand, emphasizing the patience about her, the Latina knew she only possessed with Brittney, of all people.

"Was that the night that we went to Breadsticks together?" Brittney asked, scrunching her face in an expression of deep thought.

"Yeah," Santana smirked towards the idea that Brittney chose to measure the passing of her days in terms of the dates that they had been on. "That's the day."

"So why did they send me mail?" Brittney asked, still impossibly confused by the entire situation. "I mean, if I already took the test and all?"

"These are probably just your results." Santana shrugged, searching for Brittney's test scores amidst the paper below, tracing the contents with her finger, intrigued to see what it was that she might find.

Her eyes scanned the multitude of B.S. contained within the letter - as if anybody actually wanted to read anything but the results anyway – analyzing the numbers presented to her within the score box before pausing only briefly to allow her eyes to bug outwards twice their normal size as she took a simultaneous inward gasp that nearly caused her to choke on the bolus of turkey and cheese sandwich still lodged inside of her mouth.

"What is it?" Brittney asked, watching carefully as Santana's face transformed into an expression that made it seem as if she'd just seen a ghost within the paper before her.

"San…?" She questioned again when Santana didn't immediately respond to her inquiry, her voice dropping with an air of concern as she watched Santana merely shake her head back and forth in her shock, her mouth agape, yet continuously silent.

But her reaction had been just as warranted as dramatic; this had to have been some sort of mistake, a misprint, one of the largest errors to have ever been made in the history of SAT scorings…

After all, there was no way in hell that a letter could have been delivered to the home of Brittney S. Pierce early on the morning of Friday, June 4th, 2010 telling her that she had just scored a 2300 on her SAT's.

"Holy shit Brittney, you got a 2300…" Santana sputtered her results towards the blonde, wonderment prevalent on her voice as she watched Brittney's unexpected reaction; a dramatic sinking of her shoulders as her lower lip protruded outwards in an obvious pouting manner.

"Oh crap…" She sighed, her eyes lowering with disappointment towards her feet in exactly the same manner that Santana always noticed she projected whenever somebody commented negatively on her intelligence.

"What do you mean oh crap?" Santana asked, staring Brittney down as if she were crazy for being angry at herself for something that she had performed so remarkably in. "Britt, that's amazing!"

"Is it really?" Brittney asked, tilting her head back upwards to face Santana, her expression slowly lifting hopefully towards the idea that maybe this wasn't as terrible as she had previously believed.

"Brittney, a 2300 is like, almost a perfect score."

"I thought that you could only go up to 100…" Brittney thought aloud, her eyebrows raised in an expression of the fact that she was still clearly confused towards what Santana believed to have been obvious.

"Not on the SAT's," Santana waved her off quickly. "Do you have any idea what this means?"

"I got a 23 on a test once." Brittney shrugged in her response, still clearly not grasping the magnitude of the situation. "My teacher called me stupid so then they made me have a meeting with my parents and that weird guidance counselor."

"Well you're not stupid, Britt…" Santana smirked upwards towards Brittney, squeezing her knee tightly beneath the lunch table in her emphasis of the fact that absolutely everything that the blonde had ever done – whether intelligent or not – simply made it easier for Santana to fall more in love with the girl. "I don't think that anybody can call you that anymore. Not after this."

"Thanks San." Brittney smirked, her eyes falling upon Santana's in a manner that allowed the contact to linger for an extended series of comfortably silent seconds.

But ultimately, it had been a subconscious reflex that had pulled them away, a simultaneous jerk of the head towards the direction of the cafeteria doors as a sharp echo pushed its way inward from beyond the depths of the hallway in a manner that proved to hold the capacity to silence even the loudest of students.

"What was that?" Brittney asked in a hushed tone, directing her question towards Santana although each occupant of the glee club lunch table turned their heads towards her in their entirety; a direct response to the cafeteria having just fallen so silent that even the kids seated at the opposite end of the room probably could have heard her.

But Santana could only shrug in her silence, offering Brittney the softest shake of her head in her indication towards the fact that she knew just about as much as Brittney seemed to in this moment in regards to what it was exactly that had just befallen their crowded high school.

In fact, she had been so anxious, so stiff in her continuous vigilance, that by the time Finn had pushed himself harshly from the table, his chair scraping painfully against the floor tiles with an ear-splitting screech, Santana had been so tense with awareness, that she flinched despite herself, the softest of gasps emitting from between slightly parted lips in a motion that was caught rapidly by Brittney, who grabbed protectively at Santana's hand, their fingers interlocking and squeezing so tightly together that their knuckles turned white within one another's.

"Finn, where are you going?" Quinn's soft, patient voice addressed the towering football player as he stood to his feet, turning his back towards the rest of them without so much as an explanation before rushing towards the direction of the exit.

"Get out of here."

"What?" Puck sounded just about as taken aback towards Finn's orders as Santana had been, the feisty Latina scoffing slightly towards the idea of anybody, especially Finn Hudson, trying to order her around.

In her subconscious attempt towards lightening the mood, she turned towards her best friend, expressing her feelings on the matter to her with a soft eye roll that Brittney immediately responded to with a muffled giggle that she suppressed only by holding the sleeve of her sweatshirt up against her mouth.

"Just do it!" His tone sounded harsh, severe enough to wipe the ghost of amusement off of both Brittney as well as Santana's faces as they watched him disappear in his entirety beyond the other side of the cafeteria doors.

"He's crazy." Puck shrugged, responding to the abrupt disappearance of their male lead in the only manner that he knew how; through his compensatory sense of humor. "It must be from dating Rachel; I think that she's starting to rub off on him."

Brittney and Santana couldn't help but to chuckle simultaneously in response to Puck's statement, never missing an opportunity to laugh at the sake of Man Hands, even with the undertone of impending tragedy filtering around all of their heads.

"Hey, look over there." Brittney nudged Santana suddenly against the ribs with her elbow, pointing towards the cafeteria doors so that Santana's eyes danced quickly across them, offering a flash of what Brittney was trying to get her attention about; the image of Jacob Ben-Israel and Suzy Pepper sauntering amidst the passing students.

"Why do they always have to travel in packs?" Santana sneered through a harsh laugh, her eyes rapidly averting back towards Brittney's. "It's like they want to make it easy for us to make their lives a living –"

But Santana merely choked on her final word, her throat burning with the residual pain caused by her abrupt silencing as a successive array of gunfire made her ears throb to the extent that she was practically forced to lift her hands up to cup her palms over her ears in an attempt to protect her sensitive eardrums from the deafening noise before her.

Her vision, improved by a rush of adrenaline, latched onto the scene before her so that she managed to catch a fleeting glimpse of the scene responsible for such a sudden display of pandemonium; a man that had simply made the mistake of being assigned lunch duty in the wrong place at the wrong time staggering backwards in a flash of red before falling motionless to the ground at the feet of Jacob Ben-Israel and Suzy Pepper…

Santana felt her lungs immediately begin to enclose all around her, leaving her panting and out of breath as she vaguely registered Brittney's hand reaching down to clutch her own with a strength indicative of her desperation to protect them both.

But Santana couldn't seem to avert her eyes from the doorway, the forms of Jacob and Suzy, which she had previously perceived as puny and weak suddenly registering to her with a staggering dominance, a terrifying presence…

It was the image of two teenagers that she had been laughing silently behind the backs of mere moments before that had suddenly rendered the girl completely and utterly silent for the first time in her entire life with the recognition that Jacob Ben-Israel and Suzy Pepper hadn't come alone… this time, they had brought friends.

The only friends, it seemed, they had ever managed to hold onto in their entire lives.

Santana could only guess that based on their lack of success with their own kind, Jacob and Suzy had finally figured that they might as well try their luck using the assistance of firearms.

And by the looks of things, it had worked… At least, people were finally starting to notice the two of them for the first time, well… ever.

Suddenly, heads had begun turning from every which direction towards them, a thousand sets of eyes following their every movement as if they had managed to achieve celebrity status in a manner of seconds simply by sauntering from the hallway towards center stage – directly in the middle of the cafeterias boundaries.

And with one rapid, single movement, Suzy Pepper found herself moving each and every student within the room; one gunshot in one split second igniting frantic teenagers so that they pushed upwards simultaneously, pounding across the length of their enclosed quarters in their pandemonium.

Santana recognized the fact that her glee club had scrambled; shooting upwards and out of their chairs so quickly that they seats overturned, performing impressive back flips in mid-air before landing harshly against their sides. She recognized the fact that said chairs' previous occupants were flinging their bodies down against the ground in tandem with each other, pressed so tightly against one another beneath the alluded safety of their lunch table that their skin seemed to mesh together into one single, tangible unit.

All except for one…

"Santana…" Brittney muttered with a heart wrenching screech from her position beneath the table, her head swiveling desperately for any sign of the girl although her range of vision was impossibly restricted with the idea that she was currently crushed so tightly up against Quinn on one side and Mike on the other that she could barely so much as move.

"SANTANA!" She screamed suddenly in a manner that made it so she could feel the people besides her jump, her tone reeking with desperation towards the realization that her best friend, that the girl she loved wasn't amidst their ranks.

She could hear her voice sweltering above the heads of her friends just before the bullets began to rain down upon them, stifling even her loudest of cries, leaving each and every one of them to swivel chaotically in their panic in a desperate search for their fiery friend…

"Where'd Santana go?"

"Has anybody seen her?"

"Where is she?"

The various questions filtered through Brittney's ears, but she knew for a fact that not a single one of them was as desperate to find Santana as she was… In fact, she was so determined to find the girl that she found herself completely prepared to scramble out into the open in her search, prepared to embark on a suicide rescue mission without so much as a second though on the manner…

She was already halfway out from underneath the protection of her table when she collided; bone-on-bone with something very stiff, something very hard… a set of muscular legs that had left her head aching painfully for but a brief second before the relief that had suddenly swelled through her heart erased any notion of discomfort.

"Santana…" Brittney sighed in her relief, wrapping her arms quickly around the backs of the girls' knees before pulling downward with all of her might… of course, for being as small a girl as Santana Lopez was, she was much more muscular than one could ever perceive at first glance so that despite her best efforts, Brittney's motions didn't cause Santana to so much as budge.

"Santana come on, get down here and hide!" She pulled at the girls' legs once again, her biceps flexing impossibly as she put all of her strength into pulling Santana downwards, only to fail once again.

"Santana! Santana what are you doing, come on!" Brittney cried; tears stinging at the backs of her eyes as she begged the girl to comply, her actions resulting in nothing but failure.

But Santana had indeed registered the movement, she'd identified the fact that Brittney was currently below her, trying to help, trying to save her life, but no matter how much her brain was currently screaming at her to follow Brittney's orders, to duck down beside her, to clutch at the girl and hold on for dear life, she couldn't bring herself to move.

She'd found it too difficult to focus on a state of logical motion amidst all of this doubt currently swirling relentlessly across her mind.

So with her brain sparking various instructions at her in all different directions, she settled to adapt to her haze by simply staying still, sitting firmly in her seat with her muscles tense and her body stone stiff as she stared straight ahead towards the scene before her, praying that somebody would come swoop down to save her, but knowing that the actual chances of that happening were slim to none.

She couldn't help but to feel as if no matter how hard she covered her ears with her hands, no matter how long she closed her eyes for, she was still taking the scene in as a whole as it unfolded all around her… No matter how many of her senses that she blocked off, it was always there.

The crowd before her was sweltering, a thousand students packed into the tightest ball that they could possibly muster all pushing towards the center of the room in a desperate attempt to use their peers, their classmates, their friends as a human shield that would hopefully protect them as the bullets continued to fly overhead although the only foolproof method they could truly rely on was hoping and praying that the next slug wasn't the one that was destined to strike them.

Ultimately, Rebecca Andrews became the first to fall.

Exhibiting a method of escape that vaguely resembled crowd surfing at a rowdy metal concert, she had been clawing her way through the shoulders of all of those around her, literally prepared to climb directly over them if she had to in her bid for the door when the first bullet rendered her shoulder into a mere firework show of blood and fragmented muscle tissue, peppering everybody within a five person radius of her in its aftermath.

And suddenly, Rebecca Andrews' scream of pure agony overwhelmed even the loudest of noises throughout the room…

Santana knew Rebecca Andrews, all right… in fact, she knew her well; or, at the very least, she knew _about_ her…

Rebecca had been a junior when Santana entered William McKinley High School a mere freshman, and at the time she had been the girl that everybody had wanted to be friends with, the girl that everybody had wanted to _be_ – Santana included.

A popular Cheerio, Rebecca was notorious for being the constant center of attention – she had all of the lead parts in Cheerio routines, all of the boys, all of the friends, all of the everything, really… There was not a single soul within the vicinity of the William McKinley High School district that didn't associate her name with booming popularity.

And then, during last year's end of the year blow out at Dustin Graham's graduation party, Rebecca had hooked up with some kid from Dayton who's name she probably couldn't even remember and found herself chin deep in a pregnancy that no girl her age could ever have possibly been prepared for.

Both of her parents had tried to keep the abortion as much of a secret as humanly possibly throughout the entirety of the summer but William McKinley High School hadn't been nicknamed Gossip McKinley High School for any old reason… The entirety of the world knew, in every gory detail, what had happened before it even did, and suddenly, nobody talked to Rebecca Andrews anymore, nobody wanted to be her, and nobody cared, or even so much as noticed when one day, she quit the Cheerios, resigned as class president, and ultimately became a nobody.

Santana could only guess that this scandal was the reason by which she had found herself so surprised to see, after a second bullet to the elbow sent Rebecca flying facedown against the floor bleeding and writhing with pain, a decently sized group of students actually caring enough to briefly pause in their motions and pick the girl that had already lost everything up and carry her out of the door towards safety.

But the reciprocation was nearly simultaneous; an abrupt substitution occurring instantaneously so that just as Rebecca Andrews' body had been lifted upwards and from the ground, a second staggered forward and replaced it, staggering forward and landing in exactly the same spot as Rebecca had previously fallen so that Santana couldn't help but to pause and reflect upon the irony of it all…

Like Rebecca, Rory Montgomery was also a senior Cheerio at William McKinley High School… and that ironic aura that Santana had currently found herself experiencing had stemmed from the fact that up until last summer, Rory had always found herself falling a mere second best to Rebecca Andrews' first… always.

That was why, when Rebecca had met her ultimately downfall amidst the strict totem pole of popularity, Rory had swooped down like a hawk, taking Rebecca's place before anybody else, including Rebecca, ever could.

The idea that these two former best friends, now arch enemies had been shot together, nearly side-by-side, and on top of that, had damn near fallen directly on top of each other in the process sent shivers straight up and down the length of Santana's spine so that, had she not known any better, she would have believed that Jacob had planned things to happen that way.

In fact, the only thing that hadn't come as a surprise to Santana upon watching Rory fall to the ground was in fact the thing that had surprised her about Rebecca the most – Rory being lifted gracefully into the air by three bypassing football players, her bleeding foot dangling awkwardly to the side, hanging by a mere few stray tendons of her ankle, her face grimacing with pain as she was carried through the impossible crowd.

Directly in front of her eyes, she was sidetracked by a flash of red – her vision interlacing with the familiar pair of pain riddled brown orbs of a kid in her grade, Jason Ruiz as he took an elbow directly beneath his nose alongside a high-pitched shriek that Santana could have easily tortured him endlessly about had the situation been different.

He was so close to her that she could literally hear the sound of the bones defining his nasal passage shattering with the impact, could see every muscle of his neck flex as he reeled backwards, his flat-brimmed Chicago White Sox hat spinning in a full 360 degrees atop his head before flying clear off, falling to the ground alongside his flailing body, shooting geysers of blood continuously from each nostril.

Santana was eleven years old when her and Jason had become the talk of Lima Elementary School's Class of 2006 following their becoming of the first two people to ever hook up with each other amidst their classmates at Claire Horton's twelfth birthday party…

Coincidentally, that very same night, the unsuspecting class had been faced with another scandal upon witnessing their class's first fist fight mere hours later between Jason and Leo Kane, a kid who had had a crush on Santana for as far back as any of them could even remember…

Leo had managed to sock Jason square between the eyes that night, breaking his nose so harshly that the blood had destroyed poor Claire's graduation cake while simultaneously disfiguring the good looks that Santana had always swooned over Jason about permanently.

Now watching him fall to the ground, blood pooling around his face as he slammed his head against the linoleum so hard that the blow rendered him unconscious, leaving fleeing students to trample across him without so much as a second glance behind them, Santana couldn't help experience the sense of déjà vu that she was currently feeling, almost embracing this sense as she allowed herself to slip backwards in time, back to a phase of time when things had been so much easier, so careless… a phase of time that seemed so long ago, so impossible now.

But not even her detachment from reality could manage to stop the bodies from falling.

Despite the fact that she had only been a freshman, Santana still knew who Lauren Marley was quite well, mainly due to the fact that they had played on the same recreational soccer team together from the age of five up until Santana had graduated middle school following the eighth grade.

Lauren had been a star from a young age; anybody could see that; a fact that hadn't changed upon her entry into high school where she breezed through to the varsity squad before she'd so much as began her freshman year.

Santana had spent a large majority of her extreme childhood swelling with jealousy towards Lauren Marley and all of her talent… In fact, Lauren had been a huge reason towards why Santana had entered high school swearing off sports permanently, instead choosing to fall into the grasp of the Cheerios.

That was why the second that she had watched the spark of Suzy Pepper's shotgun, listened to it booming with a power indescribable even compared to the likes of Jacob's Tech-9, and followed the trajectory of the thick shell as it travelled across the length of the cafeteria directly into Lauren Marley's spine, the first thought that had entered Santana's head was how much of a shame that all of those years of training for a long term career in soccer had now been wasted.

With the briefest of whimpers, the young girl was thrown forwards, sliding a mere inch across the slick floor before coming to a dead halt; silent, unmoving, and by the looks of things, seemingly un-living as well…

Nobody bothered to pick Lauren up from off of the ground… They, it seemed, like Santana, had come up with a definitive conclusion based upon a quick glance that their efforts wouldn't have been affective anyway…

The girl looked to have been killed, and as much as it must have stabbed at their heartstrings to simply run straight over her, or even, as with some cases, directly on top of her, it seemed as if they'd concluded that the time and effort that it would have taken to carry her with them simply wasn't worth it.

"Somebody come over here!" Brittney's voice rang through Santana's ears with a sudden urgency, full and prominent so that the first response that Santana managed to process was a sense of relief towards the fact that her best friend, the girl that she was impossibly in love with was safe… for now. "Somebody help me!"

Santana couldn't see her, but she could tell just from her voice that Brittney had tears in her eyes… She could identify that pain, that sorrow easily from all of the other times that she had heard it being emitted from the girl; an event that, Santana was ashamed to admit, occurred with a much higher frequency than either of them would have liked.

It had been there the first time that Brittney had called Santana in the middle of the night crying because a boy at school had called her a slut.

It had been there every time Brittney stopped Santana in the hallways to tell her how sick she was of people calling her stupid all of the time.

It had been there when Brittney had tried desperately to convince Santana that they should stop hiding their love behind closed doors simply out of fear of what everybody else might say or think…

Santana couldn't stand to hear Brittney so upset, in so much pain… After all, the blonde was easily one of the most generous souls that Santana had ever been blessed to have met…

But either way, Santana had somehow or another managed to fall in love with both Brittney's; the lively, charismatic one known to the entire world, as well as the emotional, sensitive one known to nobody but her, which is why, even in her most prominent of catatonic states, she recognized that her best friend, the girl that had been by her side since preschool, the woman that she loved was asking for help, why she was willing to do absolutely anything that she could in order to provide the girl with the assistance that she was currently crying out for.

She recognized her need to help Brittney, recognized that she had to adhere to the girl's calling… She had just relaxed her tense muscles, had just prepared her body to slink beneath the table where she knew Brittney to be so that she could gather the blonde into her arms and tell her that everything was going to be okay when a single, wheezing breath of ominous welcome from the red-headed, bespectacled boy in front of her sent a shuddering in a manner that had left her frozen once more…

"Hi, everybody!"

Jacob's voice filtered across her ears, remarkably distinct from the usual tone and stagnation that she had found herself so used to hearing from all of the times that she had simply stood idly by, listening to him cowering and whimpering in for mercy from yet another dumpster dive.

She could practically hear that voice in the back of her head right now… Soft and high pitched, pleading as he begged Santana's friends to spare him, just this once, tiny limbs flailing and red curls flapping in the wind as his pleas fell upon deaf ears…

This image circled across her mind, over and over again until she finally realized that every single memory that she had of Jacob Ben-Israel involved his resting within the pit of a dumpster… and suddenly, she understood what it was that was happening all around her right now.

Or more importantly, she understood why.

Theoretically, she had always known what it was that the consequences could be, what it was they could mean…

She had taken all of her required health classes; she had attended all of the assemblies and seminars warning the students of William McKinley High School against the potential dangers of bullying, but still… It was just difficult to believe the scope of the mistake that she had made – years in the making now – and the consequences that it had resulted in this time around.

They had all gotten in their laughs at Jacob Ben-Israel, while meanwhile the boy was left to pay with a defiled sense of pride and a couple destroyed articles of clothing… But ultimately, Jacob had gotten the last laugh on them all, and they were all left to pay with their lives…

It finally became starkly obvious to Santana, who the clear winner of this situation was here.

"Santana! Santana, come on!" The young Latina inhaled suddenly; a gasp of oxygen that she had damn near choked on as one of Brittney's multiple, frantic addresses towards her finally pulled her so rapidly from her thoughts that her brain scrambled between two distinct phases of thought for several seconds before the familiar blonde appeared directly in front of her, leaving her remarkably okay with being pulled fully back into this terrifying reality.

"Santana," The girl hissed in an abrupt whisper, grabbing her best friend by the shoulders in order to physically shake her from the daze that she had allowed herself to fall into.

"What are you doing?" Brittney asked the girl harshly, just as the Latina's muscles finally began to relax beneath her best friend's touch, her eyes dilating once more as the sudden rush of Cortisol that had previously entered her veins began diluting throughout her bloodstream.

"Come on, we have to hide!" Brittney insisted incessantly, achieving the goal by which she had entered this so blatantly dangerous mission to begin with as she grabbed Santana harshly by the shoulders and made her first harsh attempt towards pulling her downwards…

"No, please don't do it, please! No!"

Santana had every intention upon following her friend into hiding. She had every intention on saving the both of their lives from this seemingly imminent death, but then a voice rang out along the distance, familiar in all aspects other than the fact that it was currently pleading for mercy, begging for its life…

And suddenly, she found her muscles rendered, once again, positively useless, unable to cooperate with every action that her brain was currently yelling at her to perform.

"I can't do this…" She was hyperventilating, her breathing growing rapidly more and more ragged so that she could practically feel her face bluing from lack of oxygen. "I can't, Brittney, I can't!"

"It'll be okay, Santana…" Brittney whispered into the older girl's hair, a surprising calm beneath her voice as she squatted downwards until she was directly in front of Santana, the two lovers at an identical eye level. "I'll make sure that it's going to be okay; I promise."

Their eyes interlocked, laced together by Brittney's words of comfort, seeping through Santana's head to the point that even as the blast of a gunshot rang through her ears, even as the now familiar sound of a slug striking flesh indicated to her that whoever had previously been begging for his life had obviously failed to convince Jacob Ben-Israel that it had been anything worth saving, and even as newfound screams filtered over their heads, followed immediately by a scrambling that told Santana that there were people all across the cafeteria currently risking making a run for it, she still felt safe.

And she knew that she always would as long as Brittney continued to be the only thing that she ever looked at ever again.

Her heart swelled with the safety that she felt inside of Brittney's arms. Her eyes saw for the first time strictly focused upon the blue ocean's defined by the blonde's. And finally, her legs found the capacity to produce locomotion once again – as long as they followed her.

"What do we do, Britt?" She begged the girl before her, crouching below the cramped table, succumbing to the motion that her friends had been begging her to perform from the very beginning.

She was only vaguely aware of the fact that she was currently emphasizing the fact that she had placed absolutely all of her comfort and trust towards the blonde in front of her, vaguely aware of the fact that her sanity positively relied on Brittney's coming up with an effective solution towards their problem…

Which is why she was so relieved when she actually did.

Completely wordlessly, and with one swift motion, Brittney was able to tell Santana exactly what to do; reaching down, she grabbed at her fellow Cheerio's hand, interlacing their fingers together before squeezing as tightly as she possibly could, warmth sinking down throughout the innermost depths of her veins as she reciprocated the motion with the idea that she would never let go ever again.

A thunderous beat of her heart radiated with a pressure that sent vibrations down the entirety of the length of Santana's arm, transferring straight down through her fingertips and into Brittney's – a silent message that had sent them both turning into each other's eyes, pupils filled with a precisely even combination of both fear and doubt relaxing upon the contact in the silent promise that no matter what happened to them today, they would always wait for each other, they would always remain together, no matter what tried to separate them along the way.

And as much as neither of them particularly enjoyed it, the fact of the matter was that their wings had already been spread, now it was merely their hands, interlaced in order to hold each other down, that was leaving them stuck firmly on the ground, inhibiting one from taking without the other…

But Santana had quickly composited a sufficient theory towards the idea that she could never die if she simply never quit, so she pulled herself together, she decided that in that moment, she would live as if she would never live again, knowing that as long as her and Brittney stuck together, they would be alright…

So she took a leap, closed her eyes, crossed her fingers and hoped for the best as she leaned forward and pressed her lips firmly into Brittney's permanently entwining the two together in a measure that they both could only hope could last forever.

Bullets soared and swerved dramatically above their heads, ringing relentlessly amidst the screams of their fellow classmates, but in that moment, the two of them might as well have been sitting on a blanket in a picturesque summer night amidst a thunderous firework show… And in their bid for one final, fleeting moment of hopeless romanticism, they allowed themselves to believe in this ideal … For a little while, at least.

But nothing can last forever, especially not these seemingly most perfect of moments… Santana knew this just as much as the rest of them did, especially in regards to the fact that these moments had a tendency to end way before you're actually ready for them to.

It was an idea starkly prevalent to them all, especially Santana and Brittney as their lips slipped away from one another's, hands remaining firmly interlaced as they re-entered the world that they had actually managed to forget about for a few brief moments anyway…

But their forgetfulness only made their reminder that much more painful, a fact emphasized by the image of the senior co-captain of the Titan ice hockey team, Stephen Good, resting with his back pressed up against his girlfriend's chest as blood flowered from a bullet wound directly between his breastbone while mere feet in front of him, Azimo Addams lay motionless, his body eerily devoid of any signs of life.

Santana couldn't take her eyes off of him. It was as if she were waiting for something… a subtle motion of his back, rising in an indication of breath, a twitch of the hand, a groan escaping the back of his throat…

But it never came… She knew that it would never come, but still, she waited.

Beside her, she could feel Brittney tugging her body closer into her own, squeezing her hand gently where it rested firmly between them, but all Santana could manage in response was to gently reciprocate the motion of Brittney's palm beneath her clammy one, her eyes never leaving Azimo's prone form until finally, and very abruptly, a sudden movement directly adjacent to his still body distracted her attention effectively.

She saw Mercedes fly upwards from underneath their neighboring table before she'd heard the familiar, high-pitched wail of their male soprano, Kurt Hummel, and despite the fact that she couldn't actually see where he was sitting; there was no mistaking the unique nature of that voice…

"Mercedes, stop!"

The first thought that had rushed through Santana's mind was a notion of overpowering guilt; guilt towards the fact that she hadn't even noticed her two friends cowering beneath this table directly besides them, guilt towards the fact that she hadn't even considered them, haven't even considered anybody other than Brittney before this very moment…

This sense of remorse practically forced her head aside on its own accord; her neck naturally swiveling from side to side, desperate to pick up on any lingering traces of the other companions that she had left behind in their greatest moment of desperation without so much as realizing it…

There was Quinn, buried protectively beneath Puck's muscular bicep, Matt and Mike circled casually around them, and of course Brittney directly beside her…

But where were Tina and Artie? And where had Finn run off to so abruptly what seemed like so many hours ago although it couldn't have been more than five or ten minutes…? And okay, so she would never actually admit aloud to her final concern, but she couldn't help but notice that she hadn't seen hide or hair of Rachel Berry all lunch period.

But it was just as this guilt-ridden concern slowly began to filter deep down to within her very bones that it was transferred once again, this time upon one person and one person only – her body's prominent response towards her identification of the fact that Jacob Ben-Israel currently had his weapon pointed directly towards Mercedes' chest; arm steady, face neutral, body positively relaxed in his preparation to shoot to kill at a moment's notice.

He was going to shoot her. There was not a single doubt in Santana's mind that this deranged boy was going to shoot her so that now, the only question left to ask was whether or not Mercedes would be able to find it in her to withstand the blow.

"Please Jacob," Santana heard the air of her friend's pleas, barely emitting beyond a whisper so that Santana couldn't help but to compare the current feebleness of her voice to all of the times that she had heard the powerful belter nail the most impressive of ballads, hit all of the seemingly impossible high notes with a spot-on quality…

But right now, Mercedes merely sounded scared, uncharacteristically silenced, completely devoid of all of the confidence that Santana knew, that they all knew best defined their self-described diva.

"Please don't do this. Just walk away… there's still time, Jacob… Just walk away."

There was a single moment, a hesitating second in time in which it seemed as if the entire room was holding onto their breaths for dear life, just waiting to see what would come of this interaction, waiting for something, anything to happen at all.

And Santana was convinced that it had been this stillness, this thick quality brewing across the entirety of the length of the air surrounding them that had caused them all such a remarkable shock when suddenly, Kurt had jumped up from out of nowhere, scrawny limbs flailing and eyes squeezed tightly shut in his emphasis towards the fact that amidst this grand leap of faith that he was taking, he didn't want to see what the result would be.

"Mercedes, no!"

To Santana, the motions of time had suddenly sped up to a proportion that vaguely reminded her of a time in her childhood where she used to get a kick out of putting on movies and watching them in fast forward just to see how humorous her favorite characters looked moving in double time…

But there was absolutely nothing humorous about this; nothing humorous about an array of gunfire, especially when those rotating slugs were being plunged in tandem, straight into two of Santana's closest friends…

It was up until this exact moment, that Santana had actually been able to successfully retain her sanity… Up until watching two figures that had become so prominent in her life over the past year fall to the ground atop each other in a blubbering heap where she finally fell, forcing her mind back into that familiar state of regression; a catatonic no man's land identical to that by which she had experienced mere moments before, a blank stare that had left her mouth stammering incomprehensibly, her body moving completely void of her brain's instruction.

"No, no, no…" Santana muttered under her breath to herself, her body trembling as she scrambled to pull herself back out from underneath the confines of her lunch table once again, performing an awkward spider crawl back into the open cafeteria

"Oh God, I have to get out of here…" She muttered to herself the entirety of the time that she was shuffling backward. "Alguien por favor, sácame de aquí!"

"Santana, come back here!" She recognized the hiss of Brittney's command, masked beneath the cries of her remaining friends, all similar in their pleas for her to stop, to remain where she was…

But she merely ignored their calls, failed to adhere to any of their advices as she ducked underneath all of the hands reaching, yet failing to pull her back, grasping for any part of her body that they could grab onto but coming up with mere air each and every time.

But they didn't see it; they didn't understand as Santana understood that none of them were any safer underneath this damn lunch table than they would have been rotating circles around Jacob and Suzy, poking at them like sleeping bears with a neon sign that said "_Shoot Me_" dangling directly above their heads.

They were dead either way – and Santana's sharp personality preferred this inevitability to occur alongside her actually putting up a fight rather than simply standing idly by.

In her shuffling, she could feel the distance between Brittney and herself growing wider and wider with each extended inch, their arms, connected firmly between interlaced fingers, extending their maximum length until the joints of their shoulders screamed at them in protest and their hands slipped entirely away; fingertips slowly detaching so that at the exact second that they lost contact, Brittney hadn't even be able to decipher what it was that Santana was doing before she was praying for her to just come back to her already.

But Santana was beyond the realm of rational thought, she was beyond the point of adhering to the rest of her classmates' waiting it out policy, so instead of listening, she sustained her strict mindset of autopilot, crawling continuously towards the front door, eyes firmly affixed upon her good friends the entire time, heart pounding in her chest, swelling with every additional inch she achieved so that for a split second, she actually believed her motives to be successful, she actually believed that for her, freedom might just be a possibility…

And then she hit something solid; something that brought her sharply back towards reality so that in an instant, she realized that she hadn't made it nearly as far as she had initially believed herself to have had…

In fact, she would have been surprised if she'd made it any more than a single foot.

She was so close to Brittney, that she could have reached out and touched her, and she would have had it not been for the fear currently rendering her body frozen stiff, unable to move, unable to so much as breathe...

For the briefest of seconds, Santana's eyes deterred sideways, locking with the sparkling blue of Brittney's iris', glistening in her fear so that Santana already knew what, or more importantly, _who_ was directly behind her without even having to look… so she chose not to.

After all, she didn't have to look down the barrel of a gun to know that it was currently facing her, in fact, she didn't want to, because she knew, if given the choice to decide what the last thing that she would ever see in her life would be, she would always pick Brittney's eyes, hands down.

But still, she couldn't help but to wish for one single, additional moment; at the very least, enough time to allow her to profess her undying love for the best friend that had supported her through her every hardship, the best friend that she was terrified to expose her true feelings to for fear that they would interfere with her reputation… her stupid reputation that didn't even matter anymore, not nearly as much as her love for Brittney did anyway.

She just wished that it hadn't taken her until her final, fleeting moment to realize this. She wished that she could stay longer, do more, see more, _live_ more… But it became obvious to her in a split second that she would have sworn lasted hours that she couldn't, that she wouldn't, that it wasn't possible… not anymore, not ever again.

And Brittney had picked up on this; she had realized it all because she had seen it all… The smears created by the glistening, fresh blood of Kurt and Mercedes still shined brightly, hadn't even faded into that dull copper color yet before Jacob had targeted his next victim; Santana.

Brittney had already watched him accurately target two of her closest friends, and now that he had chosen his third in the form of a carefully aimed bullet being directed straight into her girlfriend's head, she recognized the fact that there was nothing that Brittney could possibly do to prevent this.

But more importantly, she recognized the fact that Santana needed her right now; that even if there was absolutely nothing that Brittney could possibly do to save her life, Santana still needed _her_; she needed her contact, she needed her comfort, she needed her eyes to remain upon her own; averted, poised, never breaking…

And they never did.

For Brittney and Santana, the world had slowed down to create an impossible speed that they would have been both content with spending the rest of their lives at.

There was nothing more than the two of them, transformed from beyond the depths of reality, connected with the mutual understanding that neither could so much as blink, just in case this happened to be the last split second that they would be given together here on this Earth.

In a fleeting moment of unconditional love and loyalty shared between the two teenagers, everything that they had ever feared, everything that they had ever been too afraid to share had vanished so that Santana's previous belief towards the idea that love was merely a weakness expressed by the foolish left her content to fall into the trap of becoming a hopeless weakling.

But nothing could ever last forever… Brittney knew that now.

It was a lesson that she had been taught abruptly; a lecture served with a flash of reality brought on by the spark of a gunshot; a reminder that beyond the façade of perfection, will always be a world full of things that are far too dark for anybody to ever truly comprehend.

She had watched the life dissipate from beyond the depths of Santana's eyes; that gentle nature that nobody but Brittney had ever managed to see behind her solid shell fading into nothingness.

She had felt the warm splash of blood, travelling an impressive distance to permanently stain Brittney's skin as it flooded in an endless river that originated from the base of Santana's skull, split in half with the force of the bullet.

She had identified with the notion that as Santana slumped dead directly besides her, she might as well have done exactly the same.

It took a long time for Brittney's body to register physical feeling again, but once it actually had, it had done so with such a storm of colors, a force that had nearly knocked her clear backwards, that the only thing that she could possibly think to do in order to keep her body upright was to hold onto the closest thing that she could possibly find – the dead body of her best friend, her lover – and pray to God that by some miracle, Santana, that any of them would actually be able to walk away from all of this still intact.

Brittney squeezed her eyes closed firmly; barely registering Jacob Ben-Israel's lingering form as he circled the circumference of the glee club lunch table like a hunting Great White, slowly evaluating which method of attack would be the best approach.

She willed this feeling, this unbearable pain rapidly settling deep down within the pit of her very stomach away before hesitating slightly with the understanding that it never would… And suddenly, she realized that in order to ever truly survive a tragedy, you had to allow yourself to lose control every once in a while.

So that was exactly what she did.

Clutching at the girl that she loved so desperately, terrified to let her go for fear that had she done so, she would never truly possess the power to bring her back from the world that she had since escaped to, the world that for Brittney, seemed impossible to comprehend…

But Brittney now knew that she didn't hold the capacity to argue with what fate had offered the two young lovers so that all at once, she found herself left impossibly angry with time itself for choosing to wait until the very last second to allow her to come to this realization. So she fought it; she begged, and she pleaded with the very clock to give her a mere second to act upon this sudden, mutual understanding…

But it didn't; and she knew that she shouldn't have expected it to; after all, it never did anything to her benefit, but still, she sobbed relentlessly, tears streaking her cheeks, highways of rainfall marking their territory in a perfectly straightened pathway across her face without a single regard towards who could see her, who could hear her…

And finally, she prayed, however worthless her words might have been, for the one girl that had ever managed to teach her what it meant to love and to be loved in return to come back and remind her of this fact before she forgot all over again…

No matter how impossible she now knew that to be.


	11. Quinn Fabray

**Hey everyone! First and foremost, sorry for the wait but updates are gonna come slow the next few weeks. My rugby team is going to nationals for the next week so I have to make up all the school work that I'll be missing now. Then with Thanksgiving and finals things are starting to get hectic so bare with me! I promise I'll have things up as quick as possible. **

**Also, for all of you who have been asking, I not the next chapter but the one after that, we'll go back to what's going on with Rachel, Finn, Shelby and Will, so just something to look forward to :)**

**Thanks again to everybody sticking with me on this one! Love you all.**

* * *

><p><strong>Chapter 10<strong>

**Hold on to Who You Love**

(Quinn Fabray)

The first conscious thought that she found herself actually able to hold onto within her skewed impression of the time-space continuum was the fact that it had been shattered in its entirety.

Defying every law of physics that she had ever been taught, she watched as a spiraling bullet, travelling faster than her naked eye could ever possibly keep up with, struck dead center against the glass casing of the old-fashioned clock face hanging above the main entrance, pierced the device with ease and rendered time in itself at an absolute standstill so that she couldn't help but wonder whether or not this whole act was supposed to be some sort of tragic metaphor this entire time.

But whatever it had been meant to be, the lesson had ultimately served its purpose, allowing Quinn to finally and fully understand the implications towards the idea that life was in no way near as pressing as all of the people who are constantly doing the pressing would like you to believe… So she simply sat and embraced the fact that the world had just been made to spin a little bit slower than it had been doing before, that the idea that she had nowhere to go and nowhere to be actually made this situation as a whole seem that much easier…

And you know what, that worked… for a little while anyway.

Until, that is, she registered the liquid warmth splashing red against her porcelain skin, felt the full weight of a lifeless body slump over against her shoulder, turned only to find a body who's facial features had been distorted by a single bullet so that its only identifiable mark was the carefully inscribed _Santana_ stitched in curly script across the chest of the Cheerio's jacket she adorned.

And suddenly, her ability to define time, to define anything at all was shattered in its entirety.

Her heart constricting deep within her ribcage, Quinn's eyes widened, her conscious thought process beside itself with fear as she took a couple of subconsciously tentative strides backwards, allowing Santana's prone body to slip from the support of her sturdy shoulder and onto the floor below.

However, in her bid for escape, it suddenly seemed obvious that she had absolutely nowhere to go.

Everywhere she turned, she found herself met with yet another obstacle; a dead or injured friend on either side of her, one gunman standing at her front, another at her back… She was trapped; a feeling that she'd never found settled well with her, a feeling that she hadn't experienced since she was still living in her parent's house amidst the burden of the lie regarding the one good thing that had ever come out of her – her daughter.

She couldn't help herself but to release the shudder that had been building up deep within her very bones ever since the inception of this tragic mess; a tremendous quake that sent her entire body flailing, forcing her to reach a hand out behind her to steady herself.

The appendage reached firmly backwards, subconsciously crossing the barrier between her and the outside world that had been created by the lunch table that she was currently crouched beneath, landing in such a manner that forced her to only vaguely register the fact that she felt, not the cool linoleum of the floor below her, but the stiff material of thick shoelaces, holding into place, a heavy boot, stained with a warm liquid that she didn't want to register, although she knew exactly what it was…

She could feel the physical presence of a body behind her back; could hear the creaking of joints as it bent forward at the hips, hovering before her so that warm breath swept through freezing cold air, coagulating together before landing on the back of Quinn's neck in a manner that forced her hair to stand on end.

She knew that Jacob Ben-Israel was currently standing directly behind her, tempting her to turn, to meet him eye-to-eye, and despite her better judgment, despite her brain screaming at her not to succumb to his attempted eye contact, to not allow him to win, her conscious had other plans; enforcing the idea that if she was indeed about to die, she best do so with at the very least, a shred of dignity…

And so she turned.

Her head swiveled against the stiff axis of her spine, the first feature her eyes consciously recognizing being the overwhelming array of red curls sweeping unceremoniously into Jacob's face so that for a single fleeting second, Quinn couldn't help but wonder how his accuracy had been so good thus far with all of that hair blocking his vision this entire time…

But just as suddenly as this thought entered her mind, his hair was swept back and away from his face with a single shake of his head, leaving her staring directly into the cold, dead, black eyes hiding behind the thick lenses of the glasses that he adorned, and suddenly, she found herself answering her own question, suddenly, she understood.

She understood the fact that his eyes no longer saw what everybody else's did, probably hadn't for some time… It was just a shame that it took until this for anybody to actually notice.

"Boo,"

She had been so caught up in analyzing and assessing the physicality of Jacob's features that when he actually spoke, she couldn't help but to find herself taken aback; her mouth opening to form a silent scream although no sound was ever actually emitted as she threw herself backwards, the entirety of her body weight subconsciously landing against the firm frame sitting directly behind her – Puck.

She felt him throw his arms protectively around the width of her body, positioning his body as much as he possibly could amidst the cramped cover of the table top, directly in front of her; a noble act of heroism that Quinn always knew Puck to be capable of despite the fact that she knew his deepest fear was losing his reputation by expressing it.

"Come on man, don't do this…" Puck's voice may have sounded steady, confident even, to the untrained ear, but Quinn was one of the few to have the honor to say that she has seen the boy in his true form; the _Noah_ within the Puck… She caught the slight wobble behind his voice, yet somehow, it just made her trust him even more. "If you're trying to get to Quinn, you're gonna have to go through me first."

"Noah… please," Quinn begged him not to feel obligated to play the hero, tried to express the notion that she could take care of herself, that if he got hurt, or worse, killed strictly for her sake, she would never be able to forgive herself…

But her voice emitted in no more than a mere whisper, a gentle breath of wind that even she barely registered… Her words fell unnoticed to both boys before her.

"You know that that wouldn't be a problem, Puckerman." Jacob's wheezing, nasally voice emitted with a sense of confidence only enhanced by the pistol that he was currently waving between clenched fists, holding firmly onto the handle of his firearm with such a desperation that his very knuckles were turning white before him. "In fact, you'll be doing me a favor; I can kill two birds with one stone."

"BANG!"

He screamed with a harsh suddenness behind his voice, thrusting the barrel of his gun forwards simultaneously so that it grazed so close against Quinn's face that she could literally feel the heat radiating off the end from all of its repeated usage.

Quinn found herself flinching involuntarily; Jacob's echoing exploitative barely even coming close to registering with the same pitch and power as that which his gun made every time that it had been fired, but still, she couldn't help but to be prone to reacting unexpectedly to sudden noise at this point…

She even felt Puck's muscles flex subconsciously tighter around her, felt his heart lurch forward within his ribcage in his own physical response.

"Is this what you want, Puckerman?" Quinn watched as Jacob transformed directly before her very eyes so quickly, she'd almost missed the transition; his previously calm demeanor morphing into the expression of a full-on lunatic, the brunt of his violent personality emitting in response to Puck's open challenge towards him. "You're the one that did this to me, Noah Puckerman!"

He straightened himself up at the waist, presenting his body at its full height as his pupils narrowed into slits so small that Quinn couldn't even comprehend how it was that Jacob could even see properly as he thrust his gun forwards once more and jammed it against the side of Puck's head so forcefully that Quinn could hear the collision of metal against bone, simultaneously feeling as Puck's grip against her body loosened as the blow to the head dazed him momentarily.

"You and this slut girlfriend of yours," He jabbed the brunt of his attention back towards Quinn, redirecting the positioning of his weapon so that it rested directly against her forehead, branding a permanent burn mark in the shape of a ring across her skin. "You both did this to me."

"No…" Puck forced himself from the fog of his apparent head injury, pulling Quinn's body deeper into his own so that her head was ducked beneath his arm in a measure that made it impossible for her to see anything other than the underside of his arm. "No, don't hurt her."

She understood Noah's intentions as being only for the best, understood that the only thing that he was trying to do was to protect her, but she was terrified of being blinded towards everything passing by before her, the idea being that should the bullets start flying, she would want to see the one that was made to kill her before it actually did.

"Jacob, please!" Quinn begged, her voice muffled by Puck's muscular arm as she pulled her head forcibly up from beneath the barricade so that she could face him, tears subconsciously streaking a straight path down her cheeks so that her sobs choked up her words nearly inaudibly. "We're sorry, okay! We never meant to hurt you!"

"Ha!" Jacob emphasized his annunciated, sarcastic laugh, pointing it directly into her face, so close to her that she could feel the breath of wind that carried it, bouncing directly off of her cheek. "Well guess what, Quinn; it's too late for that now… What's done is done."

His final words were emitted in no higher than a whisper, a statement that glistened so quietly across her eardrums that she was positive of the fact that she was the only one to have heard it.

With a pang of defeat, she processed the meaning behind his words, recognized the fault laced across his voice as he raised himself upward, straightening his spine stiff and raising his arms wide before him so that Quinn was vaguely reminded of all of those pictures she used to study in her Sunday school books of Jesus preaching to his followers before him.

"This is all of your faults!" With a thunderous boom, his voice carried across the length of the silenced cafeteria, bouncing harshly across the walls before coming straight back into their ears, this time accompanied by a handful of muffled squeals, released subconsciously in response to Jacob's harsh accusations. "You all hurt me."

Pausing briefly in his ministrations, he reflected proudly on the idea that his voice alone had just brought such fear, such utter terror into the entire student body before him before ducking downward once more, bending so that he was directly in front of Quinn, accompanying his action with the motion of pressing the barrel of his gun once more into her temple…

"And this time," He muttered, predominantly to himself as he pulled the hammer of his weapon backwards, the firm clicking sound it produced emanating to Quinn as a tiny voice whispering repetitively inside of her ears – _this is it_. "You're going to pay for it."

She was shaking like a leaf, left as nothing more than a spluttering mess despite everything her brain was screaming at her about not dying like a coward, not showing Jacob that he had won.

"Wait!" Puck shouted so suddenly that Quinn had nearly jumped straight out of her very skin; her anticipation towards the idea that the next, and last, sound that she was ever going to hear would be a gunshot causing her brain to temporarily misidentify Puck's voice as such. "You can't shoot her; she's a new mother, Jacob! Come on, man, you can't shoot a mother, not when her baby needs her!"

With an audible sigh of relief subconsciously slipping from Quinn's mouth, Jacob lowered his weapon momentarily from her head so that for the briefest of seconds, she actually believed that Puck's final attempts towards reasoning had actually worked.

She turned her head quickly towards him, flashing him the smallest of gratuitous smiles that her emotionally worn body could actually muster… After all, his eyes had been continuously watching over her with an aura of protection ever since the beginning, she knew it, and for that, she couldn't thank him enough.

"Valiant attempt to save your little girlfriend, Puck," Jacob spat, calling Puck's lie out for what it was, his face glistening with malice as he articulated his every word just to prove that he wasn't known as William McKinley High School's gossip hound for no reason, that he wasn't about to be fooled. "But my sources have confirmed that yours and Quinn's baby is currently being cared for by none other than Rachel Berry's biological mother… So don't worry, neither of you will have anything to worry about."

From beyond the very depths of her throat, a sickening sob was released from Quinn's mouth, her heart aching with the reminder of the daughter that she would never be granted the opportunity to see, the daughter that would never know her true mother for who she was…

But at least Jacob had been right about one thing; at least Beth wouldn't be forced to feel the repercussions of his actions today, at least she wouldn't have to live with the knowledge that her mother had helped to cause a massacre of astonishing proportions strictly due to her inability to be kind and reach out to a kid that had wanted nothing more than to be liked his entire life.

Yes, Quinn was certain of the fact that with or without her, Beth would grow up to be just fine at the hands of not herself, as it always should have been, but by a woman that she barely knew, a woman that she had spoken to once in her entire life and had only seen a mere handful of times more…

"You won't do it." Her thoughts were ultimately distracted by the words that even she couldn't believe herself to be hearing… Was Puck really sitting here, cowering amidst the cafeteria table that had since been painted red with the blood of all of their friends calling Jacob's bluff? "You don't have the balls to shoot either of us, Israel, I know you."

With a shuddering breath, Quinn squeezed her eyes closed with frustration and ducked her head downwards into the crook of her elbow… This was a firm example of one of the many moments of her life that she wished that Puck would just shot the hell up already…

Okay, so she knew that Jacob's relentless threats on their lives must have been a pretty harsh blow towards Puck's manhood, and she knew that if there was one thing that Puck defended more than anything else in his life, it was his manhood, but still, just because his options were currently running thinner than air, that didn't mean that he had to go ahead and shoot off comments that were clearly untrue.

After all, one quick sweep of their cafeteria, since turned slaughterhouse, would tell you that Jacob in fact, was not afraid to shoot anybody.

And despite the fact that prior to Puck's comments, Jacob had merely been playing with the two of them – a sick game of cat and mouse to appeal to Jacob's own desire towards power – with Puck's threatening statement, the younger boy's face fell, his mouth curled upwards into a sneer and his eyes glowed a sickening red; the anger prominent in his face as he spoke in the lowest of snarls that turned Quinn's blood to pure ice.

"Why don't you look around, Noah." He extended his arms, indicating towards the cafeteria before him, formulating a directional towards the multitude of bodies littering the floor surrounding them so that both Quinn and Puck were forced to take in every prone form, every speck of blood, every blank stare, every life lost… "Look around at all of your friends, all of your classmates, and then say that to me again."

Jacob paused in his ministrations, his eyes staring relentlessly into Puck's, Puck's staring equally as unblinkingly right back, both refusing to break their eye contact as if trying to read each other's minds, trying to read their next moves before either even made it.

It was the reason, she assumed, that they had both found themselves so prepared, the reason that they processed Jacob's motions before the boy's firing arm was even raised, the reason that when a bullet finally did ring out, they had been prepared.

But despite the fact that she had been ready to experience pain like nothing she had ever felt before, it never actually came… And with this harsh acknowledgment towards the fact, she recognized the idea that just because she had been spared, didn't mean that the rest of them had as well; a statement that became starkly obvious to her upon the release of a low grunt of pain originating from somewhere directly behind her.

She risked glancing towards its origin; her eyes peaking upwards and over Puck's shoulder, her motions slowed in her fear towards finding out who it was that had made that inhuman noise.

Behind her, her remaining friends had been left scrambling; Mike, Brittney and Matt tumbling and turning amidst Kurt's writhing body, Mercedes and Santana's still ones… There was blood, that much was for certain, but the problem now was that there was so much of it that Quinn couldn't seem to identify where it was exactly that it was all coming from…

But then her eyes captured the fleeting image of a body falling backwards from its balanced state, and with that motion, Mike and Brittney parted like the Red Sea in an effort to give Matt room to recover from the air being knocked straight out of his lungs as he clutched onto his stomach, blood seeping through his fingers in his failed attempt to staunch the puncture wound.

Quinn squeezed her eyes firmly shut in an effort to protect her racing head, not wanting to see the definitive result of Jacob's bullet, not wanting to know whether or not Matt could possibly survive the attack, or if yet another one of her glee clubbers, another one of her friends had been taken from her today.

Begging herself to apply the deep breathing exercises that had gotten her through child birth, the idea in mind that they could get her through this too, Quinn found herself entering the ultimate struggle, in through the nose and out through the mouth being a much more difficult feat to accomplish when all she could hear was Matt's guttural cries of agony from behind her, Mike's hushed assurances that everything was going to be okay, Brittney's torn sobs as she struggled to decide between helping Matt and mourning her dead best friend below her.

She found herself suddenly begging for time to move a little bit slower, begging to be given just a little while longer… There were so many things that she still had to say, so many things that she still had to do… this couldn't be it; it couldn't be over; not here, not like this.

Her eyes darted open with an abrupt unexpectedness with the second ringing of a gunshot before her, the bullet releasing itself mere inches away from her ears, rendering her completely and utterly deaf for a handful of seconds as she simultaneously inhaled sharply in a rush of cold air that filtered through her lungs so sharply that it knocked the air straight out of them so that for a second there, she believed herself to have actually been shot.

But slowly, her brain began to process the actual image of the scene before her; Brittney skirting abruptly away from a bullet intended for herself so that it missed the blonde by mere millimeters, instead lodging itself directly into the shoulder of Santana's already dead body…

The girl's limp form jolted only slightly, a direct response to the force of the bullet succumbing to the rules of inertia as it pitted to a stop deep within her body… But the blood was minimal, the effect negligible.

The damage had already been done, a reminder that rooted itself within all of their stomachs as Santana's body ultimately rested just as still as it had been before, not a single sound escaping from her lips nor a single grimace appearing across her face in response to having been shot.

In fact, shooting Santana had roughly resembled the equivalent of shooting a life-sized ragdoll; a reminder that Quinn hadn't exactly found herself prepared for although she knew that she should have been…

She could feel her lower lip quivering despite itself with the realization that the feisty young Latina whom she had been able to call a friend for years now was now dead. Her chest heaved up and down, performing impressive ministration within mid-air despite its inability to actually acquire a single molecule of oxygen, nothing worthwhile stemming from her hyperventilating chest as she felt a single tear slip from the corners of her eyes, followed by another one, and another one that led into a full on waterworks show.

Burying her face into Puck's shoulder, she could feel her tears staining through his sweatshirt, spreading unceremoniously across the fabric until it resembled a damp sponge, the moisture coming right back up and into her face as if she needed a reminder that she had been crying.

She begged herself not to lose focus, tried praying, tried pleading to God himself to will this horrible nightmare away, to get her out of this one alive, but she simply couldn't find it within herself to do so… How could she have been so stupid as to succumb to the ploy of Christianity for all of these years, fooling herself to believe in prayer as if God was listening to a single word that she had to say, as if he was actually there at all when it had suddenly become so clear to Quinn that he wasn't, that he never was.

And as if in a silent confirmation of this thought, instead of retreating, the gunfire was only enhanced, the relentless noise swelling and swirling above her head until it all became too much for her to take.

With her eyes squeezed firmly closed, she raised her palms up and over her ears in an unsuccessful attempt to block out the gunshots, to block out the agonizing scream of defeat as it escaped from the back of her throat…

Her voice carried across the length of the ceiling, meshing with a tragic sense of poeticism alongside the gunshots above; a high pitched wail that stung at even her own ears, continuously covered within her cupped hands.

"Quinn, Quinn stop!" Puck begged, shaking her at the shoulder as she continued to scream, to cry, begging her to silence herself while the opportunity was still there to do so. "They're gonna come back here, Quinn, please! Quinn shut up, please!"

But Puck apparently didn't understand everything that she already had, didn't know that it no longer mattered whether she shut her mouth or not; they were gonna die here today, that much was a damn certainty, and it was left without so much as a single doubt within Quinn's mind any longer…

So she refused to listen to him; instead releasing all of the frustrations that had been mounting inside of her for the past sixteen years of her life; she screamed for the child that she had been forced to give up, the parents that had never truly loved her… She screamed for the friends that she had already watched die before her, the impending death that she knew that she herself was about to face…

And through it all, she refused to open up her eyes; not even once, refused to see whether or not a bullet would be coming for her next… Instead, she just waited, she waited for the pain, waited for the promise of eternal paradise that she wasn't so sure that she was worthy of, and with every passing gunshot that she heard and it wasn't there, well she couldn't help but wonder which one of her friends had been left to take it.

She only chanced peering out from behind her closed eyelids after the bullets finally stopped, dissipating into a cloud of smoke that left her with the understanding that in this latest rampage, she had somehow managed to come out unscathed…

Her face buried deep within her arms and her eyes wet with the understanding of how close she was to the end, she lifted her head slowly upwards, squinting in the sudden brightness of the fluorescents, evaluating the scene before her, almost afraid to see what it was that she would find in response.

But Jacob hadn't even been turned towards them in his rampage… In fact, it seemed as if h is back had been facing them the entire time…

Quinn's eyes followed the trajectory of his still-pointed pistol, following its pathway the length of the cafeteria where it seemed to point smugly towards the prone body of a freshman boy whose name Quinn didn't even know…

She could barely make out his face from the way either of them were positioned; him laying awkwardly in a heap on his side, the upper half of his body projected outwards and into the hallway as his legs splayed permanently inside of the cafeteria so that it became obvious to Quinn that Jacob's distraction from them had come in the form of this young, baby-faced boy darting for escape, and missing freedom by mere inches.

Her brilliant blue eyes found his wide, empty ones… He looked so young just laying there, a kid… He was just a kid amidst the rest of them.

"Now why don't you tell me who it is I won't shoot, Puckerman!" Jacob shouted in his expression of triumph, turning slowly away from the young freshman and back towards the glee table, his feet stamping harshly against the ground with every step forward that he took as he clamored awkwardly towards them, instead of stopping at the head of the table, climbing directly on top of it.

"I am not afraid to kill anybody, Noah!" Quinn could hear him yelling from directly on top of them, could hear the stamping of his boots against the thick wooden frame separating them from him so that the thin layer of wood trembled above them, sending specks of dust and debris flying into each of their hair. "Test that theory again if you really want to!"

Quinn struggled to steady her breathing beneath the ominous feet of Jacob Ben-Israel tracing his path up and down the length of the lunch table that they were hiding beneath… She surveyed the scene before her quickly, trying with a desperate attentiveness to block out Jacob's shouting as she evaluated Kurt, still struggling amidst a seeming unconscious to get Mercedes' limp body weight off of his own with little luck…

She tried not to think about the fact that Mercedes wasn't making any motions at all; no twitch of the hand, no rise and fall of the chest, no nothing…

Then there was Santana… poor Santana. Arguably one of William McKinley High School's biggest beauties, a girl destined for escape amidst the threatening confines of Lima, Ohio, blown to pieces in an instant; her gorgeous features no longer so much as identifiable amidst the mask of blood that her face had since become.

The only ones left amongst them aside from her and Puck were Brittney and Mike… and Brittney was busy struggling to comprehend the fact that she had just watched her best friend's face get blown off while Mike was simultaneously struggling with trying not to become the most recent one able to claim they'd lost their best friend to Jacob Ben-Israel's bullet, his hands pressing against the wound glistening across Matt's stomach firmly, blood smearing his palms as the football player below him struggled less and less, his strength sucking straight from his body with every drop of blood that fell to the floor below.

This was a battle that they were currently losing, Quinn could see that much – she could have been blind and still have seen that… There was that voice consistently snickering in the back of her head telling her that she could be freed from all of this pain of her past, all that she had to do to achieve it was to be willing to die, and honestly, she almost embraced it…

Of course, the more she thought about it, the more she realized that she didn't want to be freed from her past if that meant missing out on her entire future.

And suddenly, it became obvious to her that the only way that she was going to escape a life-ending bullet was to reason with Jacob… Suddenly she knew that it was time to take matters into her own hands.

Wiggling herself strategically out of Puck's arms, she was only vaguely aware of the fact that he was calling back to her before she was even gone, hissing warnings towards her not to be so stupid, to retreat back to the false sanctuary of hiding, but she ignored all of his calls, pushed past each of his frantic attempts to restrain her, and squinted against the open sunlight as she stood confidently upright amidst the center of the cafeteria, forcing her body to resist trembling amidst her overwhelming fear as her eyes darted rapidly back and forth between Jacob and Suzy for several tense seconds before ultimately landing directly upon Jacob.

"Jacob, this needs to stop." Her voice was soft; high in its characteristic calming nature. "Please, before anybody else gets hurt or… or killed." She squeezed her eyes shut at her last word, images of each and every one of the dead flashing behind her eyes as she did so.

"And why should I do that, Quinn Fabray?"

"You're getting yourself too deep into something that's bigger than any of us, Jacob." She pressed him to see reason, begged her voice to sound confident although deep down inside, she was feeling more and more foolish with each word that escaped from her mouth. "It's not too late to take it back, Jacob."

"It is too late." He informed her firmly, shaking his head vigorously from side to side so that once again, Quinn was able to catch that glint of red behind his eyes as they refracted into and out of the fluorescent glow of the overhead lights above. "Look around, Quinn; it's been to late… I can take it back? _I_ can take it back!"

His voice grew steadily louder with each word that he spoke, his eyes narrowing and breathing increasing so that she knew in an instant that she had said the wrong thing.

"What about you? You could have taken it back! You could have stopped this! You could have stopped this long before it even started, so don't you tell me that I can stop."

Jacob's words faded into a silence that tore through the room harsher than any bullet ever possibly could… Quinn swallowed, out of ideas as to how to keep Jacob talking, how to keep him from shooting her, but it seemed that she had at the very least, brought herself a little bit of time as Jacob seemed to bid every intention upon continuing to rant now that he had been given the opportunity to do so.

"Kids at this school have been ignoring me since day one!" His voice shouted harshly, rabid in its anger, everything that had been building up inside of him for the past sixteen years of his life emitting here, now. "They made me hate myself, made me wish that I had never even been born… I'm simply returning the favor. I'm taking matter into my own hands now, Quinn. It doesn't matter, none of it does; fate doesn't wait for any of our plans… The sooner you learn that, the better off you'll be."

"I'm sorry Jacob."

The apology slipped from between her lips, came out without her particularly meaning to say it, but before today, it was impossible for Quinn to ever dream, let alone physically understand exactly what it was that sorry could mean, but today she knew it… and she meant it.

God, did she mean it.

"It's too late for that." Jacob shook his head gently, emphasizing his statement in an effort to counteract everything that Quinn had been trying to tell him this entire time.

She was suddenly out of things to say, suddenly out of things to do… Puck had been right, this had been a mistake, but this was not like any other mistake than she had ever made in her life, this was the ultimate mistake, the one that was going to cost her everything, including her life.

A flash before her eyes captured her attention… She had almost forgotten that Jacob hadn't come alone, that he had not been the only estranged teenager to have walked into their high school with a gun today; a second child transformed into a murderer within a mere handful of heartbreaking minutes.

"Suzy…" She muttered; her mouth dry to the point that her voice was barely recognizable. "Suzy, this isn't you."

In truth, Quinn didn't know how truthful her words actually were, in fact, she didn't know much about Suzy Pepper at all.. But in her bid to work with what little that she had been given, she knew that Suzy had since proven to be skittish, hesitant even with her weapon, leaving her under the firm belief that she would be much easier to talk sense into than Jacob had since proven to be.

"You don't know anything about me." Suzy snarled, seemingly expressing the exact same thing that Quinn had previously been thinking despite her hopes that she wouldn't.

"I know that you're not an evil person, Suzy, that you're not violent…" Quinn tried to reason with the girl but couldn't quite seem to push past the idea that she was right, she didn't know. "I know that you would never actually kill anybody."

"You're wrong." Suzy responded firmly, Quinn grimacing directly in her response, her last attempt at reasoning knocking her flat on her ass in her failure… She truly hadn't believed Suzy Pepper capable of murder, not based on everything she'd seen of her anyway… Jacob's prominent dominance within these walls had given her that idea, but she had nearly forgotten that this whole debacle hadn't begun inside of this cafeteria at all…

Quinn had no idea what had happened within those hallways, what Suzy had done before all of this.

"I already did kill somebody, Quinn Fabray. Your little friend, Rachel Berry; I shot her, and I killed her. So don't tell me that I'm afraid to kill anybody, because I'm not."

Quinn's body reacted physically towards Suzy's unexpected revelation, shudders wracking her every limb as she was forced to dwell upon the relationship that she had had with Rachel over the years – the rare ups and the more prominent downs - now that the girl was dead…

The thought left her uneasy, queasy even as her stomach performed a dramatic free fall as a direct response.

It was only as the echoing gunshot faded into the background, dwindling downwards into silence, as the smoke emanating from the tip of Suzy's shotgun lingered into her nostrils that she realized that this feeling inside of her stomach wasn't one of unease, wasn't fear presented as a physical entity, but a bullet, embedded deep underneath the skin of her abdomen, straight through to the organs within.

The pain hadn't yet physically settled, the impact of this traitorous addition to her body not fully registering in her consciousness as she brought two trembling hands upwards, cradling her stomach in a manner identical as to that she performed mere weeks ago when a child rested in the exact same place that a bullet was currently nestled within.

And all at once, she found herself wondering why she had previously believed that she'd had to run straight through her life without stopping once, without looking back… Now that she was so aware of the world's traitorously unforgiving pace, she just wished that she'd found the time to slow down, to embrace everything that she could now never have ever again.

"No, Quinn!"

Puck's low, growling undertone lingered between her ears as she watched him scramble out from underneath the table out of the corner of her eye, using the speed training that years of being Lima's star wide receiver had left him with to sprint forward towards Quinn, catching her delicately between his two outstretched arms before she could even hit the ground.

He lowered her downwards slowly, collecting her high into his upper arms as they rested as one against the floor, her back pressed tightly into his chest, his hands interlaced between hers, pressed firmly against the bleeding wound in her abdomen.

And for a split second inside of Puck's arms, the world in its entirety managed to disappear, became nothing more than him and her inside one another, so that as the features began to spiral with the various ups and downs that they had been through together, she couldn't help but laugh with the idea that this might just be how it all ended.

"What the hell can you possibly be laughing at right now?" Puck asked, sounding alarmed, yet strangely amused by Quinn's unruly reaction to having just been shot.

"I was just thinking…" She paused, her breath hitching upwards in her own throat as the pain washed even the lingering echo of a laugh, straight off of her face, forcing Puck's expression to turn downward immediately in response to the reminder of where they were and what they were doing there. "I was thinking about how it's a good thing that Beth was already born… She's safe now; she'll always be safe now."

She felt Puck's hand squeeze subconsciously tighter around Quinn's stomach, tensing as he froze at her words, not wanting to relish on this fact, but at the same time, unable to deny how true it was.

"You need to watch over her, Puck." Quinn's face had suddenly morphed into something fierce; her eyes darting upwards to meet his own in a serious glare that she knew would ensure that Puck knew that she meant every word of everything that she was saying to him right now. "You need to make sure that Shelby's taking care of her, Noah… Make sure that Shelby's watching over our daughter."

"No… no, Quinn I can't do this without you." Puck stuttered and stammered incomprehensibly, his voice telling Quinn that he would never be able to do this himself even though Quinn knew deep down in the back of her mind that he could… he always could. "You need to fight this, Quinn! I already had to say goodbye to our daughter, I can't say it to you too."

"You'll do fine, Noah." She shook her head against his uncertainty, trying to profess the confidence that she couldn't help but remember herself shooting down all of those times while she was pregnant with Beth, all of those times that Puck had professed his desire for her to keep the child, that they could take care of her together… all of the times that she had denied him.

"_You're a Lima loser, and you're always gonna be a Lima loser."_

"I can't do this without you."

"Yes you can." She assured him, her hand twitching underneath his own so that she could grip his hand more firmly as she took several shuddering deep breaths and closed her eyes against the current pain radiating through her very bones.

"Do you remember when we were younger Noah?" Her voice quivered as she rambled into a tangent spurred by the haze of natural pain killers. "When things were easier?"

"Of course I do." He assured her, sniffling against her words as he tried desperately to contain his tears, although the emotion behind his voice told her just how much he was struggling to do so.

"Do you remember when we were growing up? You used to say that you needed me, Noah, and I never said it, but I always used to think that that made you sound so much smarter, so wise… More than you'd ever actually admit that you actually were anyway."

"Please Quinn…" Noah Puckerman had never been a beggar, and even if he had been, the tone didn't suite him very well, but of course, desperate times called for desperate measures, and this was as desperate a time as any… even Puck knew that much.

"Noah…" She pressed him to listen to her, begged him to see reason, to understand that neither of them had any control over what was about to happen, and that this was just something that they would both have to accept, that they would both have to live with. "Noah, you have to promise me."

"Of course," He nodded, but Quinn could still see the tears behind his eyes as he spoke. "Of course I promise, Quinn… But Beth… she needs her mom too."

"She's got a mom," Quinn assured him, as if in a reminder, through a sharp, inward gasp of pain that forced her eyes to water over with a subconscious layer of tears that faded even her most prominent senses closer into darkness. "Shelby will take care of her, Noah… She might just need some help for a little while."

Her mind filtered through everything that Suzy had told her, all about how she had found Rachel roaming the hallways, about how she had killed her… And although Quinn knew that Rachel and Shelby's relationship hadn't exactly been pristine, well, neither was her and Beth's but Quinn still knew that should anything ever happen to her daughter, her heart would still be ripped out all the same, which is why she knew that Shelby's inevitably would as well.

Her vision sweltered rapidly into a blackness that accompanied an unconscious shudder that travelled all the way down the length of her spine; a sudden jerk of fear that let her know that she was riding dangerously close to the border of the bitter end.

She knew that she should be brave, that she needed to be the strong one here, but that internal fear was rapidly taking over, the wonderment of what could have been, what now could never be…

What if a point in time came along where her daughter needed her? What if her family, her friends couldn't find it in themselves to get along without her? What if there was some sort of incredible injustice deep within the very depths of heaven sparred by either overcrowding or the sins of her past and she wasn't allowed inside… Then where would she go?

She could hear voices in the distance; the deep trembling tone that she almost didn't recognize as Puck's solely due to the fact that it lacked the strict confidence that the mohawked boy had always been known for, and immediately following it, the high, nasally whine of Jacob…

But she couldn't make out any distinction between their words, her world suddenly growing too fuzzy, too indistinct to hear much of anything above the thin drawl of air being emitted from within their mouths.

The shades of grey that her vision had since become regarding the world around her was beginning to fade deeper, darker; an inviting blackness that Quinn couldn't help but to find welcoming despite the eeriness of its eternalness.

A glossy, indistinct figure was reaching out towards her, telling her to follow him forward, and she was ready to, truly she was.

In fact, the only thing that could have possibly pulled her back into the world that she had found herself so prepared and astonishingly willing to leave all behind was the blast of a second gunshot ringing above her head, forcing her eyes to fly predominantly into focus, a final burst of adrenaline that allowed her to watch, clear as day, as Puck clutched onto his chest, grimacing in pain as his subconscious shout of pain leaked above the residual shot of the bullet that had just struck him.

He toppled forwards, eyes firmly closed even before he so much as hit the ground so that when he finally landed against the ground below him, face to face directly before Quinn, the only thing that she could see was his closed eyelids, clenching at her struggling heart so that it lurched painfully and threw her straight forwards once more into the jet-throws of death itself.

"Noah…" Through gritted teeth, she allowed his name to emanate off of the tip of her tongue, focusing the entirety of her concentration upon moving her hand, just a single inch to her right in order to land on top of his own, desperate to feel that pulse beneath her fingertips, that warmth spread upwards from his palms.

She couldn't see a single thing; her vision impossibly skewed by blood, her body paralyzed with injury…

She called out to him once more, but her voice was so soft, so fragile that not even she was able to hear her own words, her ears still ringing with the lingering gunshots as they faded into mere echoes just as suddenly as they had erupted with the force of fireworks.

Her elbow bent inward, arm outstretched, amazing her in its expression of the human body's ability to always find that secret hidden strength inside of it, even when it seemed as if there were nothing left…

She dropped her hand down directly on top of Puck's, initiated first contact, felt the cool skin of the top of his hand radiating underneath her own clammy palms.

"Noah, please…" She choked, her tears streaming down the back of her throat so that they choked her as she begged him for a response that never came. "Who's going to take care of Beth? Please Noah, please be okay."

Her vision was fading quickly into absolute nothingness, Puck's unconscious features blurring before her very eyes as she put her ever effort into forcing herself into retaining consciousness, into finding that tiniest spark of life hidden deep within the very crevices of her body, but her efforts were futile, she knew it; she could feel it.

Her hand was latched firmly onto his own, all of the strength that she had left inside of her focused solely on her commitment to hold onto him until the very end.

Their fingers were entangled; Puck's limp hand intertwined within Quinn's weakened one until finally, one by one, her muscles submitted to a welcome unconsciousness, her fingers slowly began to unfurl around her until ultimately, her hand fell limp, landing lifelessly at her side, mere inches away from the only one that she had been searching for this entire time.


	12. Noah Puck Puckerman

**So, first and foremost I would like to thank everybody for being so patient! I know it's been a while, but life's really been eating me up lately so thank you everybody for baring with me, and I tried to make it up with a really, really long chapter!**

**And also, for all of you who are wondering, I promise that you will find out what happens with Will, Rachel, Finn and Shelby in the next chapter. All of you guys eagerly waiting have been extra patient, so an extra big thanks to you.**

**As always, huge shout out to all of you sticking with me here, you guys are awesome so I hope you enjoy this chapter!**

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><p><strong>Chapter 11<strong>

**Life and Doubt**

(Noah "Puck" Puckerman)

He had been raised to hide his fear behind the façade of toughness.

When his father walked out on his family, when his mother struggled to afford food for her children, when he lost his best friend to his own errors in judgment, when he handed his daughter over to another woman, another life…

Each and every time, his upbringing had taught him to take it with a stony coolness and a straight face; no outward expression of emotion whatsoever.

So he'd learned to compensate with anger, with violence. When he was upset, he yelled when really, the only thing that he wanted to do was cry; instead of throwing tantrums, conditioning had taught him to throw fists.

But not today.

Today, he watched empty and aghast as his friends, his family fell all around him leaving him unable to turn in a single direction without being met with destruction…

The pressure built behind his eyes, weighing him down impossibly with the images; David Karofsky, Azimo Addams, Mercedes – all dead in a flash right before his very eyes…

And finally, just as he feared that any more would break him in his entirety, Santana Lopez's lifeless body slumped forwards against Quinn's strong shoulders; his two most prominent ex's meshing together poetically as the faceless entity that a bullet had since turned the striking Latina into launched Puck's emotions directly over the edge of an already teetering mountain.

And so, he cried.

He no longer cared about who saw him, no longer cared what they would think, what they would say in response to witnessing arguably the toughest guy in this entire school lingering with tears in his eyes…

The truth was that Noah Puckerman had always been equipped with a weak side, a sensitive spot in his desperate desire to have somebody to hold onto, somebody to tell him that everything was going to be okay when he in turn, couldn't find the strength inside of him to believe those words himself.

So he reached outwards, hands grasping to satisfy his burning need for comfort from the only other person in the entirety of this world who knew of Puck's weaknesses, and not only embraced, but appreciated them even more than she did his strengths…

Through his subconscious desire, his senses directed him over towards Quinn, watching as the young blonde scrambled just out of arm's length, away from her motionless friend; her pale face exemplifying her wide, shimmering eyes as she performed impressive pirouette motions that got her absolutely nowhere, like a mouse trapped inside a maze, looking for safety that they both knew she would never achieve.

He wanted to stop her, wanted to convince her that she needed him right now just as much as he needed her, allow her to fold perfectly into his arms so that he could create the allusion that he was taking care of her when really, it would be her taking care of him, but his endeavors proved to yield nothing but failure…

Reaching a blind hand outwards and towards her, he subconsciously grabbed for anything on her body that he knew he would be able to latch onto, coming up with nothing but air each time… He had failed her, certainly not for the first time, but with the consequences of his failure lingering painfully on his mind, he knew that it could very well be the last.

His eyes were scanning about the cafeteria with the depth and focus of a panoramic image; each detail extending from his peripherals straight into the innermost depths of his brain so that the concept of slow motion struck him like a blow to the head just as Quinn seemed to have lost the concept of her spacial orientation all together, becoming disoriented enough to allow her hand to slip from beyond the boundary of their hiding place where it rested heavily atop the booted foot of Jacob Ben-Israel, permanently locking in the notion that now, his attention was attracted towards them, and it wasn't going anywhere.

They were screwed.

"Boo."

Jacob's voice rang eerily loud across the underside of their table, thick like fog in a manner that forced Puck to release a subconscious shudder that was merely reciprocated by Quinn tenfold as she reacted violently to the sudden presence of Jacob's face beneath the cover that was supposed to protect her from him…

She leapt impressively, the entirety of her body leaving the ground by which she rested on by solid inches before the laws of gravity pulled her miraculously downwards, perfectly between Puck's arms, already outstretched in his anticipation, always ready to catch her any time that she found herself falling.

Flinging his muscular arms forwards and around her shoulders, he laced his fingers together at her sternum, using brute force to position his body as much between her and Jacob Ben-Israel as he possibly could given their constricting spacial limitations.

He craned his neck behind him until his muscles began screaming their protest against his actions, fighting valiantly through the pain that this unnatural motion was causing him just so that he could ensure that he would be facing Jacob in all of his stony glory so that at the very least, he would be looking directly into the boy's eyes as he begged him for his life, hopefully diminishing the pathetic vibes that he knew that these actions would radiate in the process.

"Come on man, don't do this."

He slapped himself mentally upright and over his head when these words became the best that he could manage to come up with, repeating the self-inflicting action twice as hard upon feeling Quinn tense beneath his arms; an unspoken indication that she had caught the fear that he'd tried so hard to mask behind his voice, subconsciously scaring her even more than she already was…

"If you're trying to get to Quinn, you're gonna have to go through me first." He attempted to make up for his abysmal excuse for an opening statement by enforcing his commitment to playing the part of Quinn's hero; a role that he had always wanted to be granted despite the fact that he'd never particularly imagined it being under conditions such as this.

"You know that that wouldn't be a problem, Puckerman." Jacob sneered beneath Puck's words, taking no sentiment behind their meaning as his eyes merely glistened with the idea that now he would simply be able to get to the both of them without putting in so much as an ounce of extra effort. "In fact, you'll be doing me a favor; I can kill two birds with one stone."

"BANG!"

He screamed with such a sudden vigor that Puck hadn't had so much as a second to prepare a reaction as Jacob moved with an abrupt swiftness that he had never even thought to associate with the boy… By the time Puck's body had responded to Jacob's sudden shouting with a rush of adrenaline that forced his muscles to flinch from within their cocoon of skin and bone and his heart to ram painfully against his ribcage, Jacob's arm was already extended, outstretched so that the gun clasped firmly within his tangled fingers was suddenly a mere millimeter from the side of Quinn's head.

Sweat beaded in profound droplets across Puck's forehead; a direct result of the overwhelming fear currently wracking his every nerve cell combined with the heat radiating off of the weapon being held uncomfortably close to the mother of his child's head…

He struggled with the concept of logical reasoning; his words catching up with themselves somewhere deep along the back of his throat as the feeling as if somebody had just shoved an entire box of cotton balls into his mouth permanently ensured the fact that not a single sound would be emitted from him in this moment.

He couldn't think of anything to say, couldn't think of anything to do that would save either of them from what, in this moment seemed to be a sealed fate… It was why he knew that if they both died right here and right now, it would all be entirely his fault strictly due to the fact that he couldn't seem to find it inside of himself to stand up and be the man that he knew that he had to be right now; the man that was willing to stand up for the woman that he loved…

No, the only thing that it seemed that he could possibly do in this moment was simply just to sit and watch as this deranged psychopath before them pointed a gun at the mother of his child's head and flexed his finger tauntingly against the trigger before them.

"Is this what you want, Puckerman?" Jacob's face had transformed with an abrupt suddenness into something that Puck could only find to describe as pure evil… All at once, his expression had become inhuman, his actions presented as sharp, defined as his eyes glowed black underneath the overhead lights with pure malice…

But he knew that this was not something that could have just happened as abruptly as Puck had registered it, he knew that this type of vast change, this ungodly shift wasn't something that could have just happened over night… not even close.

No, it seemed as if Jacob Ben-Israel had been shifting further away from human and closer towards this individual that stood before them today for years now, and they had missed it; every single one of them…

And now they were all paying for their selective observations, for turning a blind eye towards the opposite direction, for refusing to give a cry for help, sixteen years in the making so much as a second glance…

"You're the one that did this to me, Noah Puckerman!"

Guilt flashed across Puck's insides alongside Jacob's words, burning him with shame so that he could physically feel his autonomic thermostat increasing his body temperature so that the only thing that he could truly bring himself to concentrate on was the idea that his face was currently flushing a deep, prominent red…

That is until he'd felt the sudden rush of wind followed immediately by a sharp pain that connected against the side of his head making it so despite his concentration being previously so focused, he now found that he couldn't really bring himself to concentrate on much of anything at all…

He'd somehow managed to catch the quick flash of metal, the image of the barrel of Jacob's pistol as it approached him with a speed that made it register with Puck's range of vision as a mere flash of light…

The connection of steel against bone rang prominently between each of his ears, a heavy echo that filled his brain with a fog that was only exemplified by the damage that the sudden blow was bound to have caused as for a fraction of a second, his entire body went limp…

His muscles were tingling, his eyes blurring over; but it seemed, that they only thing that could possibly pull him back into any sort of realm of conscious thought was the only thing that actually happened as the feeling of Quinn slipping steadily from his grip overwhelmed his senses, allowing him to commit to gathering all of his strength together just so that he could secure the grip that he had previously held around Quinn's upper body once more…

"You and this slut girlfriend of yours," Jacob carried about his deranged speech as if he hadn't just knocked Puck out cold with a firearm, as if the scrambling currently infiltrating Puck's head would actually allow him to listen… "You both did this to me."

"No…" Puck muttered feebly, fighting the tingling sensation that had managed to infiltrate each of his limbs as Jacob redirected the business end of his weapon from Puck's head and back onto Quinn's.

He solidified the meaning behind his slightly slurred stance by pulling her as closely into her body as he possibly could muster before continuing to pull her even closer.

"No, don't hurt her."

"Jacob, please!" Quinn begged Jacob from her position nestled safely beneath Puck's arms, her voice muffled by his muscular biceps so that he could feel her warm breath against his skin as she spoke, lingering alongside a cascade of wet tears as they began their descent down the full length of her cheeks. "We're sorry, okay! We never meant to hurt you!"

"Ha!" With a serene sense of sarcasm blatantly evident behind his voice, Jacob turned, directing the entirety of the weight of his words onto Quinn despite the fact that Puck knew that he was the one to blame, that it should be him sitting with a gun against his temple, not her. "Well guess what Quinn; it's too late for that now."

His heart gave a particularly painful lurch inside of his chest as the finality behind Jacob's words lingered for a painfully lengthy amount of time before dissipating against his face…

Without so much as another word, Puck watched as the boy straightened himself out, standing perfectly upright in the acknowledgment that he had a roomful of cowering teenagers at his mercy by his feet; his confident poise allowing his outline to catch the light above him in a manner that made him seem impossibly bigger than Puck had ever seen him before…

Raising his arms outwards, Jacob showed off his impressive full wingspan, signifying for the attention of the cafeteria's occupants although Puck was more than certain that they had all been watching him this entire time anyway, just waiting to see exactly what it was that he would do next.

"This is all of your faults!" He wheezed in the sudden, pronounced boom of his voice as it rang ominous off of the cinderblock walls and beyond, "You all hurt me!"

His voice dropped in his final statement, fading into a silence that Jacob in turn, accepted comfortably as his lingering classmates stared horrorstruck amidst the unsettling pause as it rattled their nerves, if possible, even more so than they already were.

He rested his hands steadily against his scrawny hips, gun remaining securely at his side as he fashioned his thumbs through the hoops support the belt containing his seemingly infinite rounds of ammunition and scanned his eyes proudly amidst the destruction that he initiated, that he had caused.

In fact, Puck had gotten so used to Jacob's calm watch over them all that the suddenness of his next movement took him by complete and utter surprise; so quick that there hadn't even been a transition, and all at once, much like only mere moments before, Puck had blinked, and Jacob was once again, holding the barrel of his pistol firmly against her temple.

"And this time," He made the strides to complete the initial statement that he had started addressing to the entire unfortunate student body before him, this time ducking his voice downwards so that it was merely Puck and Quinn that could hear the hissing anger laced within every word as he spoke. "You're going to pay for it."

Puck could feel Quinn shaking in his arms beneath him; her body trembling to the point that he was struggling to retain the firm grip that he had across her upper body.

Subconsciously, he found himself squeezing his arms tighter, begging her to embrace this sense of comfort that he was trying to enact inside of her, but he doubted very much so that she had so much as registered it, her mind much too busy racing alongside the thoughts of her impending death to be comforted by much of anything; especially something as mundane as a simple squeeze.

His mind was scrambling he had to think of something more productive, something that could effectively manage to save Quinn's life, and he had to think of it fast…

It had become apparent to him in these past seconds that Jacob was no longer fooling around with them, he was no longer hovering tauntingly above them, scaring them merely for the sake of fear… This time, his intentions were obvious; he wanted them dead, and Puck was never one to simply roll over and accept much of anything – especially this… He couldn't do that; not for himself, and certainly not for Quinn.

"Wait!" The word slipped from Puck's mouth without him particularly meaning to allow it… Of course, calling Jacob's attention away from his current intentions upon placing a bullet into Quinn's skull was a step in the right direction, but beyond that, he had nothing; no game plan, no heroic action, nothing.

His mind raced for the presence of an effective follow up, but each successive idea seemed stupider than the last… At this point, the only thing that he really had to go on was the thought that maybe, just maybe, his calling to Jacob would cause Jacob to instead shoot him first, buy Quinn a couple of extra second; and who knew, maybe they would be enough extra seconds to allow her to achieve escape…

He could only hope.

His eyes locked with Jacob's, and as much as he tried to maintain that wrought of stony confidence amidst his features, as much as he tried to silently communicate with Jacob that he knew exactly what he had gotten himself into, knew exactly what he was going to do next, it was all a lie, and he knew that Jacob would never fall for all of the bullshit lingering beyond the fear.

But in a sudden rush of light and sound, all at once, the image of Jacob's hate-filled eyes, the insides of the barrel of the gun that he was currently staring down disappeared in a flash of brilliant colors, replaced instead with images of his entire life dancing across his subconscious – some of his proudest moments, laced between those he regretted the most.

And yet, through it all, there seemed to be but one consistency, one solid portrayal of his life that never seemed to go, never seemed to leave him behind so that even when he was brought back into reality with a sharpness that roughly resembled a punch to the chest, even after dreary images faded and became replaced with vibrant red curls and a smoking handgun, he saw it – Quinn and Beth.

And suddenly, it all made sense; suddenly, he knew exactly what it was that he had to say, exactly what it was that he had to do.

"You can't shoot her; she's a new mother, Jacob!" He professed, the desperation prominent behind his eyes, "Come on man, you can't shoot a mother, not when her baby needs her!"

For the quickest of seconds, he had actually believed his final, desperate act to have worked… Watching with a sigh of relief and the relaxing of his muscles that filled his chronically tense muscles with a rush of gratitude, Jacob lowered his weapon downwards and away from Quinn's head, positioning it briefly against his side…

Conducting a premature prayer of overwhelming gratitude deep inside of his head, Puck foolishly allowed his guard to fall; the adrenaline that had previously been running so prominently inside of his veins that his heart had been on the verge of exploding fading so that the organ's frantic thumping was allowed to dissipate back to its previous pace.

He allowed his muscles to fall flaccid, his head rolling into Quinn's shoulder in the silent acknowledgment that she would be alright, that he would always be there to protect her; a motion that she returned with the smallest of gratuitous smiles that was laced with the sting of residual tears clouding her striking blue eyes.

"Valiant attempt at saving your little girlfriend, Puck," Jacob reciprocated, pulling the two teens away from each other's own thoughts and back into reality, back into the reminder that they were both currently hanging on by a mere thread. "But my sources have confirmed that yours and Quinn's baby is currently being cared for by none other than Rachel Berry's biological mother… So don't worry, neither of you will have anything to worry about."

Puck's heart froze so suddenly that it physically pained him; Jacob hadn't been fooled, he should have known that he wouldn't have been…

The sob that emulated suddenly from the very base of Quinn's throat, echoing harshly throughout the entirety of the room became a very accurate description of exactly how he was feeling himself at the moment; his head was spinning, he felt physically nauseous…

But he had to stay strong; if not for himself, then for her, for them; for Quinn and for Beth…

He was almost sickened with the idea that he had used his daughter as a bargaining chip for Quinn's life, and now that the desperate act hadn't even met him with success, he had become downright appalled with himself… He could only hope and pray that Beth would never be able to find out for herself what her father's final act in life had been; that he had died a coward…

No; he couldn't leave this life with so much as the possibility that Beth would grow up with an image of her father as being anything less than a hero, he just couldn't… He had to do something to fix this; something, _anything_.

"You won't do it."

Okay, so admittedly, he knew before the words had so much as escaped his mouth that this may not have been the best approach that he could have taken. It was a big game for even a person of his stature and reputation to be talking, after all, one quick glance about the cafeteria, at the multitude of bodies littering the floor – most of which had been shot by Jacob himself – not only told Puck, but everybody else around him that Jacob would indeed shoot any of them without so much as a second's hesitation towards the matter.

But it had already been said, he had already started this… He had chosen to cross that line from protective into pure insanity, and now he had to stick with it; even if it did mean facing the untold consequences of his actions.

"You don't have the balls to shoot either of us, Israel, I know you."

From in between his arms, he could feel Quinn shifting uncomfortably against him; a silent emphasis towards the fact that she wanted nothing more right now than for him to shut his mouth before he got them into even deeper shit than they'd already found themselves in.

"Why don't you look around, Noah." The tone behind Jacob's voice had shifted with a sudden, dramatic force so powerful that it had Noah Puckerman cowering in fear; an action that he hadn't allowed himself to succumb to since he had been a child, hiding beneath his bed with his infant sister cradled between his arms, listening as his parents fought audibly, and more often than not, physically right outside his door…

Above him, Jacob's eyes narrowed into slits, the reflection of the fluorescent lighting striking against the lenses of his glasses at such an angle that from where Puck was sitting, they appeared to be glowing; a red so deep that Puck had to do a double take just to ensure that he hadn't made the entire thing up…

But despite the difference in the shades, Jacob's pupils were empty; there was absolutely no life behind them, no feeling, no nothing… just pure, unadulterated hate; hate that he had never before seen, hate that he never before believed possible for a single human being to possess… and for Puck, that was what scared him the most.

"Look around at all of your friends, all of your classmates, and then say that to me again." His voice rose steadily until he was shouting once again, motioning proudly towards the multitude of prone bodies that littered the room so that Puck had been practically forced to follow Jacob's instruction, sneaking quick glances outwards despite his insistency upon maintaining a strict eye contact with Jacob just to ensure that he would be prepared for Jacob's next move when the right time came for him to make it.

And he had been prepared; he had been more prepared for that move than he had been prepared for absolutely anything else in his entire life and he knew it, because when that gun finally did go off, he pounced; leaping upwards and over Quinn's body, covering it with his own to the best of his ability just hoping and praying that he possessed the capacity to move faster than a point-blank range bullet.

But his first thought as the blaring shot finally settled distantly inside of his ears, as the world around him faded into a silence even more deafening than a gunshot was that he had failed; his heart sinking with the idea that he had not been prepared enough, that he had not moved fast enough, that he had not saved her… he never could save her; not now, not ever…

To him, this telling factor came alongside the notion that he had felt no pain, none whatsoever… He was throwing himself into the line of fire, he was taking a bullet for her; at the very least he had expected pain; earth-shattering, indescribable burning…

But it never came.

From somewhere surrounding him, a harsh grunt of pure agony infiltrated into his every sense, freezing his heart in the acknowledgment that he had been wrong all along, the bullet hadn't struck him, in fact, it had missed him altogether, sparing him at the expense of another…

He pulled himself harshly away from Quinn, scanning quickly across her body in an effort to take in the extend of the damage; he looked for blood, he looked for any indication that she was in any pain, he looked for anything at all, but he never found it…

His mind was just racing with the idea of what it was that he could do to save her now that she had fallen victim to Jacob's bullet when he realized that she hadn't even been acknowledging him at all; instead, she was merely looking horrorstruck over his broad shoulder, eyes wide and directed towards an image behind her…

And all at once, he realized that they had both been spared… for now.

But with a heavy pang, he realized that this was something that couldn't be said for the rest of them, and with a sensation of guilt that seeped through him straight down into his very core, he realized that by challenging Jacob, he had achieved nothing more than awakening the sleeping bear…

Jacob was ready to prove to Puck that he in fact was not afraid to shoot anybody by shooting everybody; and right now, that everybody included his teammate; the star running back that, with his wide receiver skills and Finn's stellar performance as quarterback had turned William McKinley Football's offensive line into something that people used to laugh at, into something that people feared… It included his fellow glee club baritone; the only other kid that held the capacity to hit the lowest notes right alongside him…

So now, Matthew Rutherford had been left doubled over in his pain, tears stinging subconsciously at his eyes despite his best abilities towards holding them back as he clutched desperately onto his stomach, blood seeping through his fingers and onto the floor, dripping with the relentless, taunting sound like a faucet that you could never quite shut off all the way.

For a brief moment, he impressively retained his firm stance sitting upright, fighting against everything that his body was screaming at him about giving up before finally, he lost it completely, teetering backwards too prominently too right himself back up again so that his body slammed downwards, forcing him onto his back, his legs tucked unceremoniously underneath him, his head rolling limply to the side as Mike scrambled to take over the role of staunching the blood pouring from Matt's stomach now that the boy could clearly no longer do it himself.

Directly besides him, he could feel Quinn begin to hyperventilate; her frantic breaths hitching within her heaving chest in erratic motions that Puck could physically feel against his body…

The noises being emitted from beyond the base of her throat were terrifying him, leaving him confident with the understanding that if he didn't find a means by which to calm her down quickly, she would be passed out in a manner of seconds; an issue that he currently just did not have the capacity, or the strength to handle.

"Quinn –" He began, but his words were suddenly drowned out to even his own ears as they rang out alongside a second gunshot; one that he had not found himself as prepared for as he had been the last one so that the echoing inside of his head disoriented him momentarily, leaving him forgetful of his previous intentions as he scrambled to find where the trajectory of the bullet had been pointed.

Through his peripherals, a flash of blonde hair skirted across his vision; Brittney scrambling sideways, stumbling unceremoniously over her own two feet in order to distance herself from a bullet that had been clearly intended for her, as it grazed directly past her head, leaving Puck prominently aware of the idea that she had just missed death by mere inches…

But beside her, Jacob's bullet had found it's unintended home, and with a stab at his heart, Puck watched as it buried itself deep within the unresponsive skin and musculature of Santana's limp arm…

The effect of seeing a bullet striking a live human being was shocking in itself, devastating in the manner by which you could physically watch the life exit a person's eyes…But to his utmost surprise, Puck found something even more appalling about watching a bullet striking a dead body, because as he watched Santana's limp form shift only slightly with the force of the bullet before falling equally as still as it had been before, he felt as if he had just been slapped clear across the face, the reminder of the idea that Santana was dead and that she was never coming back had struck him so hard.

He could only guess that it had been the realization of how final death truly was that had pulled such a dramatic reaction out of him… It was just that it was something that he couldn't deal with, something that he wasn't ready to understand…

But it had since become something that had been forced upon him despite his level of preparation; and the more he thought about it, the more he understood the idea that he couldn't quite imagine any of the rest of them to have been any more prepared for this day than he had been…

But somehow, despite the fact that Puck had been rendered irreparably motionless, incapacitated by the image that had stained his eyes before him, by some sort of miracle, Jacob had actually begun to retreat, walking slowly away from the glee table, back turned and eyes scanning cautiously against the width of the entirety of the room before them.

He had become a wild animal, hunting relentlessly for prey, and by some sort of miraculous act of God himself, he had decided both Puck and Quinn unworthy of his hunt…

But this hadn't granted him a free pass not to be wary of Jacob or Suzy's every where-about… He wasn't willing to risk going as far as to say that they were safe quite yet; no, that would have been much too bold a statement – even for somebody like Noah Puckerman…

"Quinn," He sighed deeply into her hair, relaxing the tight grip that he had on the girl only slightly as he turned downwards in an effort to catch the blonde's attention, only to be met with no more than a sobbing heap before him…

He could feel her body between his arms, trembling violently as she scrambled for refuge, rendered temporarily insane by her desperate desire to achieve escape… Her bony appendages were pressed so deeply into his own that it was starting to become painful, her tears had begun to seep a clear puddle across the barrier of his sweatshirt and onto his skin, staining it in an even film that left him chilled with the lingering moisture.

And through it all, the only thing that he could think to do was to wrap his arms protectively tighter around her, squeezing with an equal, if not greater strength than what she had pressed down into him, focusing the entirety of his attention on keeping her calm until a distraction overcame him in the form of a sudden motion that had caught the very corner of his eyes…

Everything, everybody throughout the room had been previously rendered so still and so silent that when Jonathan Smith, a young freshman who's name Puck knew solely because he had spent the summer torturing him relentlessly after he had been cut from the football team due to his horrendous lack of athleticism, ducked from underneath his hiding place and made a sudden, mad dash for the door,, it had caught the attention of absolutely everybody within the vicinity of the cafeteria…

Absolutely everybody, that is, except for – by some God-given miracle – Jacob Ben-Israel and Suzy Pepper.

Puck could distinctly remember this kid from his football try-out, remembered Coach Tanaka having them run suicides until Jonathan ultimately became the first to be rushed to the hospital from severe dehydration…

At the time, he had easily been the slowest kid to try out for the William McKinley Titans, probably in all of history, but today, he ran… and he ran faster than Puck had ever seen any human being run in their entire life.

He could hear the collective inhale being taken simultaneously by each and every person throughout the room, all of them holding their breaths in their anticipation to see whether or not Jonathan Smith would ultimately become one of the lucky ones as they crossed their fingers, hoping for the best while simultaneously expecting the worst.

Puck's head swelled with hope so that his brain swelled within his very skull… He found himself subconsciously tightening his grip around Quinn's body from the sheer tension alone…

After all, if one person could manage escape out of this God-forsaken cafeteria, well than who was to say that the rest of them couldn't either… right?

And just like that, in one single, split second, Jonathan Smith had silently become universally recognized as that symbol of hope that all of these kids still stuck hiding beneath the tables that they had been eating lunch at mere moments ago truly needed right now…

He was so close to freedom that Puck found himself able to taste it for him.

He was ten steps away… nine… eight…

But Puck couldn't help but feel that a knife stabbing directly through his heart would have hurt less than the indescribable feeling that he experienced as he watched, in slow motion, Jacob's attention shift suddenly as he sensed the unexpected presence of somebody biding for escape directly behind him…

The first shot missed by a solid mile, the second shot by even more.

All across the rooms, head had begun to turn, kids were risking peeking up from behind their hiding places as if they had been watching a movie, all holding their breaths in their waiting to see what the fate of poor Jonathan Smith would ultimately become…

He was seven steps away… six… five…

The shots being fired from Jacob's pistol were quickly becoming more and more erratic, his frustration towards his sudden, uncharacteristic lack of accuracy clearly affecting him in a manner that seemed to even surprise himself as he fired round after round towards the boy, but just couldn't seem to hit him…

Between his arms, Puck could feel Quinn tense tighter and tighter with each successive shot fired, her face buried deeply into the crook of Puck's arm so that he couldn't help but believe her to be the only person inside the entirety of this room who wasn't watching the scene currently enacting directly before her…

She was shaking so violently that even Puck's muscular forearms had begun shuddering alongside her motion… He could feel the tears continue to puddle against his skin, growing with more and more prominence as her sobs grew closer together until he could no longer distinguish between her breathing and crying…

And finally it seemed, she had lost all notion of her whereabouts, of herself in her entirety, and in a split second, she silenced; building all of the air that she possibly could into her lungs before releasing it in a piercing, shrieking scream.

He was stunned momentarily, the sheer unexpectedness of Quinn's high pitched wails throwing him off guard as they pounded downwards and against his eardrums, forcing him to commit to a temporary struggle before he could bring himself to react, begging Quinn to stop, begging her to quiet before the audio centers of his brain shattered, before his heart physically exploded from the pain that hearing her like this was causing him…

"Quinn; Quinn stop!" He begged, grasping her by the shoulders firmly, applying all of the strength that he could between his muscular hands without hurting and shaking her down to her very core in an effort to force her back into the reality that she had since clearly left behind. "They're gonna come back here, Quinn, please! Quinn shut up, please!"

Jonathan Smith was four steps away from the door… three… two…

The boy was inside of the doorway, he'd literally had one foot out and into the hall, and despite Quinn's lingering screams, Puck's heart swelled so huge that for a second or two, he could barely even here them…

He was going to make it; he was going to make it out of here.

The towering rain of gunfire paused only briefly, an attentive hesitation as Jacob screwed his face up in his concentration to detail, a single eye closed in his effort to exact the most accurate aim that he could possibly muster; and in one final attempt to forever stifle Jonathan Smith's escape, Jacob took his final shot.

In a flash of red, Puck felt as his heart leapt straight upwards and into his throat, reacting violently alongside his eyes watching as Jacob's bullet struck Jonathan directly against the back of his neck, opening it in an explosion of blood that roughly resembled a firework show on the Fourth of July…

He tipped forwards, not being given the chance to utter so much as a single sound as he fell; the evidence of how close he had been to freedom prominent within the spot that he had died in; with the upper half of his body projecting outwards into the hallway, but his legs forever stuck inside of this godforsaken cafeteria…

And all at once, there was silence once more; the sound of Jonathan Smith's scrawny body striking the linoleum, the lingering echo of the frantic gunshots that had since been fired from the end of Jacob Ben-Israel's pistol, even Quinn's ear-splitting screeching all fading into silence so that all at once, Puck couldn't help but think that he'd rather prefer the noise…

"Now why don't you tell me who it is I won't shoot, Puckerman!" Jacob's cackle echoed between Puck's ears as he indicated with outstretched arms prominently towards the plethora of dead bodies strewn in ever which direction before turning back towards him and Quinn…

Footsteps echoed closer and closer towards them as Jacob descended upon the two parents once more… He could feel Quinn clutching onto his shoulders, feel his own heart sinking further and further downwards and into his stomach with every step towards them that Jacob took…

This was all his fault, Jacob had been right all along… If he had just learned to keep his big mouth shut, maybe Jonathan Smith would still be alive, if maybe – even just once – he had told his football buddies that enough was enough as he watched them toss Jacob Ben-Israel into the school dumpsters, Santana wouldn't be lying next to him with her face blown off, Mercedes would still be singing, still be _breathing_… all of them would be.

But he was a coward; had always been and seemingly would always be… Despite his best efforts, it seemed, he had grown up to be no better than his father after all, and like with his dad, it wasn't just him that had to pay for his actions, it was everybody.

He had been so wrapped up in his own self-deprivation, his own guilt that he hadn't even noticed that Jacob had climbed atop the table above them until the wooden frame had begun to tremble over their heads…

"I'm not afraid to kill anybody, Noah!" Jacob was shouting like a maniac, his words ringing clearly through his ears despite the wooden barricade that was currently separating them…

Puck could hear the heavy thumping of Jacob's boots against the table's frame as he began to pace up and down the length of the wooden plank, and Puck couldn't help but to throw his arms instinctively above his head, protecting his body feebly for fear that any second now, the bullets would start literally raining down upon him.

And not being able to physically see Jacob, not being able to read what it was that the boy would do next was ultimately what scared Puck the most.

"Test that theory again if you really want to!"

He pointed his eyes timidly overhead, glaring at the underside of the table until his pupils began to sting as he begged his body to acquire some miraculous sense of x-ray vision in a matter of seconds, just so that he would be able to keep track of Jacob's poignant motions above them…

But the adrenaline rush currently running rampant through his system didn't seem to possess the capacity to grant him such superpowers; the only thing that his heightened senses provided him with being a particularly acute notion of hearing, his eardrums picking up every step of Jacob's feet against the wood so with every step, he was able to track his motions, know when he was standing directly above him, or directly above Quinn…

Puck had been so intensely focused, so tuned into everything that had been going on above him, that he'd temporarily forgotten everything that had been taking place directly in between his own two arms…

He hadn't even noticed Quinn wriggling out of his arms until she was already half way out from beneath the table, barely within his arm's reach of his frantic grasps towards her, barely within earshot of his hissing warnings, his hysterical insistencies that she returned to him before she made every effort that he had made upon saving her life futile and got herself killed anyway…

"Quinn!" He whispered as loudly as he possibly could, "Quinn what are you doing?"

He launched his hands outwards, made several impressive grabs for any part of her that he could reach, but his palms were sweating impossibly in his fear; every time he so much as got a hand on her, she merely slipped easily from his grasp. "Quinn, please! Come back here, please!"

His pleas were growing more and more desperate with each second that past with her still ignoring his calls. She never so much as looked back towards him as she made her way into the open, stood steadily to her feet, and faced her potential killer…

"Jacob, this needs to stop." He could barely even recognize her voice it was trembling hard. "Please, before anybody else gets hurt or… or killed."

"And why should I do that, Quinn Fabray?" He asked her smugly so that Puck could practically see Jacob's body language despite the fact that he couldn't actually visualize the boy from his position beneath the table; arms crossed in defiance, glaring down from a top his lunch table podium in a symbol of his current dominance…

But there was nothing that Puck could do for Quinn now… No, the only thing that he could do was to strain his ears to catch her and Jacob's exchange of words and trust that she knew exactly what it was that she was doing, trust that if there was one person in this room that could talk Jacob Ben-Israel and Suzy Pepper into putting an end to all of this madness, it was Quinn Fabray…

And so he listened; ears poised as Quinn presented her case, keeping impressively calm, collected the entire time in a manner that allowed Puck to believe that maybe, just maybe this crazy idea of hers could actually work…

But despite the fact that he was leaned inwards as close as his body would physically allow while still remaining firmly hidden, despite the fact that he had begged his ears to suddenly acquire the hearing capacity of a hunting dog, he could only catch mere bits and pieces of Quinn's words, her voice strategically soft in an effort to keep Jacob from reacting violently to her attempts at persuading him into surrender…

His heart froze every time he'd heard Jacob begin to raise his voice, softened once more every time his tone dropped back down into a whisper; until finally, the presence of a third voice simply confused him into a steeper level of concentration…

"You're wrong."

Suzy had been so remarkably silent throughout the majority of the interaction that Puck had nearly forgotten that she had even been there to begin with…

And apparently, judging by the silence that Suzy's abrupt harshness had rendered over Quinn, so had she.

"I already did kill somebody, Quinn Fabray." Once more, Puck's muscles tensed with fear, cramping with their frustration towards their owner's sporadic movements throughout the day… But he couldn't help himself; despite the weapon nuzzled comfortably in between Suzy Pepper's hands, he hadn't exactly perceived her to be a threat… at least, not more so than he had pinned Jacob as…

But now… well now alongside the revelation that she did indeed have murder in her heart, he feared a sudden outburst from Suzy Pepper, and he feared that not even she understood the power of the Remington Shotgun that she'd been holding onto like a security blanket this entire time…

"Your little friend, Rachel Berry," Puck closed his eyes heavily against Suzy Pepper's revelation towards who her victim had been… Sure, he'd wanted to gauge his eyeballs out every time Rachel opened her mouth, but she was going to be _the _one.

She was going to be the one to get out of Lima, she was going to be the one to make it big one day… She didn't deserve this; none of them did.

"I shot her, and I killed her. So don't tell me that I'm afraid to kill anybody, because I'm not."

Images of Rachel Berry danced poignantly across the backs of his eyes; all of the moments that they had shared together, from all of the times that he'd wanted to hug her, to hold onto her, to all of the times that he was ready to kill her he was so sick of her… each and every last one of them.

His head was racing with such an array of colors, memories so vivid that for a split second, he was carried atop them straight out of this cafeteria, straight out of this life, out of this idea that there was so much as a world left around him, let alone one as terrifying as this one had proven to be…

A shattering gunshot was ultimately what brought him back into this existence, this striking sense of reality; the reality that hat struck him so hard that he'd nearly choked on it.

The sound resonated deeply within the back of his very mind; deep, thunderous, different from the sound that Jacob's pistol had made every time he had fired it… No, in fact, based upon Puck's relatively descent knowledge of firearms, he would say that this sound much more strongly resembled that by which his shotgun made every time he went out hunting with his friends, the same shotgun that Suzy had conveniently walked into their high school carrying that morning, the same shot gun that she had been pointing directly towards Quinn the last time he'd checked…

Quinn…

"No, Quinn!" He was on his feet and sprinting up and outwards from underneath the table before he could so much as process the potential consequences that his actions might rain down upon him.

Her back was facing towards him, but the first thing that he'd noticed was that she was still standing upright, still supporting herself on her own two feet so that for a single, foolish moment, he'd actually allowed himself to believe that Suzy's bullet had missed despite the fact that the girl had been standing mere feet away from her.

Suzy's gun was still drawn; smoke billowing prominently from the end so that Puck could physically smell that nauseating scent of gunpowder that lingered only stronger with every step closer that he took…

He had been just out of arm's reach of her when he'd noticed her beginning to teeter violently against gravity, her weakened knees no longer capable of supporting her body weight so that he knew in an instant that if he didn't move faster, if he didn't force his legs to push him harder than they had ever pushed him in his entire life, she would fall with nobody there to catch her, she would die with nobody to hold onto, nobody to let her know how much she had been cared for, how much she had been loved…

So with a sudden burst of adrenaline, he forced himself to move faster, his legs pumping him so quickly forwards that he was certain that from a distance, he couldn't have appeared as anything more than a faint blur.

He arrived at her side just as her body began its irreversible descent downwards, coming up behind her so that he'd managed to catch her gracefully underneath the arms in a professional fireman's carry that allowed him to lower her gently to the ground below them.

Sinking to his knees, he positioned her into a comfortable seated position, propped up gently against his chest so that he could easily peer over her slender shoulder and inspect the damage that Suzy's bullet had inflicted her with; carefully assessing whether or not it was a damage that she would ever be able to possibly walk away from…

The blood was so prominent against her white sweatshirt that it appeared to him almost black as it spread so widely across the fabric that he couldn't even tell exactly where it was that it was coming from.

_It's not so bad. She can survive this, she can fight this. It's not so bad._

The thought rang prominently across his mind as he attempted to convince himself that there was any truth behind it whatsoever… But he had found it nearly impossible to so much as believe the words coming out of his own mouth… It was just that there was so much blood…

There was so much blood, and she was just so little… There was no way that her tiny body could withstand such damage… no way in hell.

_Stop this, Noah. Stop thinking like that… It's not so bad, Quinn is a fighter, that's what she does… She's going to be okay, we'll all be okay._

He wrapped his arms gently across her midsection, palms grazing against her intertwined hands that she'd had gently pressed up against the wound in her abdomen, pushing them inwards with an additional force that caused an unintentional grunt of pain to escape her lips…

The sound nearly tore his heart straight upwards and out of his chest… Tears stung at the corners of his eyes without him so much as bothering to try and hold them back; instead, he simply embraced their freefall as they slipped down the length of his cheeks, dripping unceremoniously from is chin and into Quinn's hair…

But just as he began to fear that he might scare her, seeing him like this; just as he believed himself to be making this situation even worse than it already had to be, he looked downwards towards her, stared into her shimmering blue eyes, and instead of fear, instead of sadness, he saw a smile; a genuine smile that wrinkled at the corners of her mouth until finally, much to his surprise, she began to laugh; a gentle, meek chuckle that sure, could barely be distinguished as such, but there was no mistaking it… she was laughing.

"What the hell can you possibly be laughing at right now?" He marveled downwards towards her… He had always known how much of a better person that she had been than him… he had always known her to have been so much stronger than he could have ever even hoped to be…

She was strong, she was resilient, she was brave and talented, and if she died in his arms right here, right now, he knew that he would be entirely to blame…

But for now, she didn't seem to want to think like that, so he respected that, and he opened his mouth, and he reciprocated her actions; their eyes connecting in the form of genuine happiness, of genuine love that they could have been absolutely anywhere in the world right now other than on the floor of their high school's cafeteria saying their last goodbye's to one another…

"I was just thinking…" She started slowly, pausing as her eyes widened in a sudden flash of pain that erased even the ghost of a smile clear off of her face, squeezing at Puck's heartstrings in a manner that made his face turn down into an expression of fear that he could only pray she hadn't picked up on…

But with a steady breath and a fierce determination lingering like fire in her eyes, she kept going… She always did just keep on going; a notion that Puck was currently relying on.

"I was thinking about how it's a good thing that Beth was already born… She's safe now; she'll always be safe now."

Her words struck a nerve deep inside of Puck's very heart so that his muscles tensed involuntarily, his hands squeezing harshly downwards against Quinn's stomach so that a gasp of sharp pain quickly escaped her lips in response…

"You need to watch over her, Puck." She craned her neck, silently asking for the eye contact that he'd granted her easily so that he could register with the fierceness behind her eyes, so that he would know exactly how much she meant absolutely everything that she was currently telling him…

And he knew; God did he know.

"You need to make sure that Shelby's taking care of her, Noah… Make sure that Shelby's watching over our daughter."

"No… no, Quinn I can't do this without you." He felt himself tripping unceremoniously over his own words, mentally knocking himself upside the head for expressing to her, his most selfish of fears in the moment that she needed him to be strong the most.

"You need to fight this, Quinn!" Blood trickled relentlessly from between the cracks of his fingers despite how hard he was pretending not to have noticed it… He couldn't help but feel as if it no longer mattered how loud he yelled, how many times he begged her to hang on… "I already had to say goodbye to our daughter, I can't say it to you too."

"You'll do fine, Noah." She shook her head at him once more, begging him to accept this gift of confidence that she was attempting to enact upon him, but he couldn't… No matter what she ever told him, he knew that he would never be able to live a life that didn't have her inside of it.

"I can't do this without you."

"Yes you can." She muttered upwards to him through the softest of laughs directed towards his uncertainty… Beneath the two of them, he could physically feel her as she directed each and every ounce of strength that she had left in her body into squeezing his hand; so he accepted the movement, he sunk into it, he begged his mind to embed it inside of itself, so that it would always be there… even when she wasn't.

"Do you remember when we were younger Noah… when things were easier?" Her voice shook as she began to ramble through her haze of natural endorphins and a diminishing blood supply…

"Of course I do."

"Do you remember when we were growing up? You used to say that you needed me, Noah." He could feel his eyes growing steadily redder from trying to withhold his tears for so long… And despite himself, he'd allowed a single one to fall.

_I do need you_.

"I never said it, but I always used to think that that made you sound so much smarter, so wise…" Her words were growing further and further apart, her breaths heaving heavily upwards within her throat as she spoke. "More than you'd ever actually admit that you actually were anyway."

"Please Quinn…."

"Noah…" She professed, clearly exasperated towards his constant attempts to avoid the obvious. "Noah, you have to promise me."

"Of course," He finally responded after yet another second's hesitation; but his promise came alongside a prominent pang of defeat that rang prominently from his chest, straight outwards and into his voice. "I promise, Quinn… But Beth… she needs her mom too."

"She's got a mom," Quinn waved off his incessantness, barely pausing between Puck's statement and her response as she reminded him that she had never been Beth's mom, and now, never would be. "Shelby will take care of her, Noah… She might just need some help for a little while."

His eyes glistened over once more as he processed Quinn's words… He knew exactly what it was that she was currently thinking; she was thinking about Suzy, thinking about everything that she had told Quinn in regards to Rachel.

"_Your little friend, Rachel Berry, I shot her, and I killed her. So don't tell me that I'm afraid to kill anybody, because I'm not."_

Quinn was right; Shelby was going to need all of the help that she could get with Beth… But he couldn't give her all of the help that she could get, he knew that… Quinn was Beth's mother, no matter what Quinn said otherwise; inevitably, Beth would need her as well.

But Quinn didn't seem to reciprocate this notion, because with Puck's promise, she'd seemed to have deemed all of her life's conflicts complete, she'd now felt it safe to finally let go…

He could feel her every muscle relaxing from within his arms, could feel the gentle rise and fall of her chest diminishing steadily… Death was lingering directly above them, and Puck now knew that it came in the form of a literally shadow hovering overhead, blocking the light from framing Quinn's fragile frame in a manner that practically forced Puck to glance upward to identify the source despite the fact that deep down in the back of his mind, he had known all along exactly who it was…

"How adorable…" Puck could feel the muscles surrounding his eyes begin to twitch painfully in his rage as Jacob approached him, staring down tauntingly upon him as he clutched onto the girl that he loved, attempted to guide her through her final moments as to make it so that they didn't have to be quite so terrifying, "William McKinley High School's celebrity couple dying together."

The single only thing currently preventing Puck from leaping upwards, from pouncing upon Jacob, from bashing his skull inwards with his bare hands was the fact that Quinn was still resting gently between his arms, fading rapidly into and out of consciousness, her breathing growing miniscule to the point that it had nearly disappeared…

But still, he wanted revenge; and if he was going to be killed in the process of taking it… well then that was a risk that he was now more than willing to take.

"I mean, it would only be fair that if one of you dies, well then the other should too…" His eyes refused to avert themselves away from Quinn, but through the additional height placed upon his remaining senses, he could hear the every groove of Jacob's finger as it brushed against the safety along his pistol, could feel the barrel of the gun pointed directly upon him despite his refusal to avert his eyes away from Quinn…

And still, he didn't care, because for the first time in the entirety of his life, he had suddenly found both him, and Jacob Ben-Israel on the exact same terms, and finally, after he'd deemed it safe to release Quinn upwards towards all of those who could do much more for her now than he could even think of doing any longer, he stood; body stringently poised and straight, muscles firm, but eyes remarkably, already dead.

"Do it." He muttered, his voice emitting as nothing more than a low growl. "Come on, Israel! You wanna shoot me? Then just fucking do it already!"

His voice grew steadily louder and louder with each syllable that he spoke, the anger professing venomously behind his voice as he watched Jacob's mouth twist upwards into a satisfied smirk; victory apparent across his features towards the idea that he had finally found Noah Puckerman's only weakness… and he had exploited it.

But it wasn't really as if he was afraid to die, he never had been, really…

Throughout the entirety of his life, the only thing that he had truly ever believed in was that there was millions, billions of people even, scattered about the world, all more terrified of death than the last, left to pour the entirety of their minds, their bodies, their souls into a belief, or into a religion that he knew would never saver save them, and that each and every one of those people were idiots.

Being afraid of dying was like being afraid of eating, being afraid of going to the bathroom… It all had to happen eventually, didn't it?

So yeah, he wasn't afraid of dying, that much he was certain of; but that didn't mean that he wasn't a little bit afraid of what would come afterwards… whatever it was that that may be…

So that was why, with the slightest hint of trepidation lingering deep across his mind, he simply accepted the blaring gunshot that had turned his world into a sheet of pure light in an instant as tunnel vision forced his eyes to focus only upon the bullet spiraling straight at him…

He stood still, waited with anticipation until it had finally struck him, square in the chest, with such a tremendous force that he felt as if he had just been hit by a truck… Falling onto his back, he quickly accepted the darkness that had rapidly begun to overcome him before he so much as had the opportunity to feel the pain with the idea in mind that if this is what dying was like, than it really wasn't as bad as he had initially thought…

Especially if, wherever he was going, at the very least, he would get the chance to see _her_ once more.

* * *

><p><em>Shit, there really is a heaven<em>…

Reopening his eyes slowly, Puck felt dazed, disoriented as he blinked several times against an overwhelming brightness, his eyes slowly channeling in on a single, pure white light dangling pointedly directly above him.

Sighing heavily, he attempted to shift, attempted to evaluate his new surroundings, but he was met with an immediate resistance; a resistance that manifested in the form of the most overwhelming pain that he had ever experienced, rendering completely immobile as he released an involuntary gasp that left him choking, spluttering on what was unmistakably blood as it filled so thick, so heavy into his mouth, that he nearly suffocated.

There was no way that this was heaven… But the more he thought about it, the more he realized; it was stupid of him to ever have thought that there was a chance in hell that he was really getting into heaven anyway…

_Shit, there really is a hell…_

That was the second thought to have infiltrated into Noah Puckerman's overwhelmingly sporadic senses as this time, it manifested not in a crippling pain radiating throughout his entire body, but in a slow, steady hissing… background noise… voices… all around him.

Wherever he was, he was suddenly very much so aware of the fact that he was not alone.

"Come on, we have to get out of here." The voice was distantly familiar, but still, he couldn't quite place it.

He tried to focus, tried to direct his brain to follow his instruction as much as humanly possible away from the unforgiving pain and onto his surroundings; his success registering prominently as his body began to take in minor details all around him.

The ground below him was cold, rough, that was for certain, but at the same time, he found himself laying in something invitingly warm; a liquid of sorts…

Above him, the spotted ceiling tiles began to grow vivid surrounding bright fluorescent lighting fixtures.

Where the hell was he?

"We can't leave them!" Another voice, again, familiar, yet still unrecognizably amidst the hazy fog that his brain had since become…

"Brittney, they're gone!" Brittney… he knew that name… where did he know that name from? And that voice… God, it all just sounded so familiar. "Come on, we need to get Matt out of here while we still can; let's go!"

"Wait… wait; he's moving!" Directly above him, a shadow descended down upon him, forcing his eyes into an uncomfortable squint as they slowly adjusted upon a face in front of his own, blurry at first, but slowly, very slowly coming into focus. "Puck? Puck, can you hear me?"

_Brittney_…

His head felt heavy with an impossible suddenness as he attempted to respond to her, his neck muscles no longer to withstand the weight any longer… His mother had always told him that he had been born with an impossibly thick skull; he could only guess that she had been right all along…

He fought through the pain, fought through the resilience as he tilted his head upwards just enough to allow him to take in the scene before him…

Students were scrambling in every which direction, some supporting others as they limped steadily onwards, some making futile efforts to drag those that weren't…

They were trampling over one another, pushing, shoving; exhibiting their most primordial of instincts just to find the first means that they possibly could out of this room… this room… where was this room, exactly?

Rotating his head upon its access, he tried desperately to jog his fuzzy memory using visual cues… He remembered eating lunch inside of the cafeteria, he remembered behind huddled beneath a lunch table, holding tightly onto Quinn.

He remembered Jacob Ben-Israel pointing a gun directly at him.

He had been shot… Oh Jesus, he had been shot…

"Quinn…" He murmured gently, the reverberations behind his voice gurgling upwards against the blood still filling up inside of his throat faster than he could even think to spit it out.

"Puck, it's okay," Brittney sobbed desperately, blatantly ignoring his clear inquiry as she attempted to gather the entirety of his rock solid body weight upwards and into her scrawny arms, clearly prepared to carry him out of this school himself if she had to…

She shifted him impossibly, subconsciously releasing, in her motions, a blast of radiating pain that felt like fire radiating off from the very center of his body itself…

With a guttural cry, his vision blasted into a sheet of solid white; for a split second, he couldn't see anything, couldn't hear anything, couldn't so much as feel a damn thing other than excruciating pain…

His vision returned to him slowly, and by the time it had, Brittney had already had him propped into a seated position, granting him a full access, panoramic view of the entirety of the cafeteria; most prominently, the young blonde resting at his feet before him, her striking features still impossibly gorgeous despite being clouded by an impossible paleness laced with a gentle tinge of blue that contrasted sharply with the starchy color of her hair…

"_Quinn, no!"_

"Quinn…" He muttered outwards to nobody in particular, his lower lip trembling as he extended his arm automatically outwards to reach her, his fingertips barely getting far enough in his endeavors to graze across her own.

"Puck, please!" With another sharp tug, Brittney attempted to get Puck upwards and onto his feet, but as if by an impenetrable magnetic force, he could only find himself moving closer towards Quinn, gravity connecting the two until his lopsided weight became too much for Brittney to hold onto and he slipped from his grasp, crashing downwards and onto the floor below where he landed flawlessly besides the girl that he had loved with every fiber of his being, the girl that he had spent a lifetime fearing rejection from… He'd always been too afraid to tell her how he truly felt.

And now it was too late.

He no longer felt any pain; he didn't feel any defeat, he didn't feel any fear… No, the only thing that Noah Puckerman could currently feel was pure agony, the kind that originated straight from his very gut itself and emanated outwards in the form of a sob like none other to have ever been heard…

Suddenly, he no longer cared about what happened to him… he no longer cared about what happened to any of them, really…

He didn't wonder where Jacob Ben-Israel and Suzy Pepper had run off to upon delivering their fatal bullets, he didn't wonder who they were currently chasing or whether or they had since been apprehended…

He didn't wonder whether or not help was on its way, he didn't wonder whether or not Brittney had chosen to give up on rescuing him or if she would return for a second try…

No, in fact, the only thing that Noah Puckerman could possibly wonder right now was whether or not Quinn was currently watching him from wherever it was that she was, and how impossibly small he must have looked to her from way up there in the sky.


	13. Sue Sylvester

**So with finals next week, clearly I have a lot of time for procrastination so the good that comes out of that is that this is probably the fastest I've put up a chapter yet!**

**Anyways, thanks for stickin' with me, the next chapter will be the last in the first part of this story and then basically the second delves right into the aftermath so I hope you enjoy it!**

* * *

><p><strong>Chapter 12<strong>

**All the Time for Second Tries**

(Sue Sylvester)

Sue Sylvester had become aware of the fact that this day had been destined to be a terrible one straight from the very beginning when she'd walked into her office at six o'clock on the morning of Friday, June 4th, 2010, only to find her favorite supply of apple-tini protein supplements completely diminished, its box lying empty on its shelf.

She had become aware of the fact that this day was bound to only go from bad to worse when she'd returned from her drive, two hours in either direction, to Detroit – the closest store willing to sell her products that weren't exactly legal in the United States yet, per se – only to find a SWAT truck parked in her designated space.

She had become aware of the fact that this day would be absolutely unsalvageable upon her realization that, in fact, it wasn't merely her parking space currently being occupied by an emergency vehicle, but nearly all of them…

"Miss! Miss, you can't drive through here!"

Sue couldn't remember a single other time in the entirety of her life when anybody had ever dared to call her _Miss_ before… Usually, she preferred "Your Majesty", although she would also have accepted "My Lord", and occasionally, even "God Almighty", but nobody, under any circumstances ever called Sue Sylvester "Miss".

Not ever.

And suddenly, she was fuming; this meant war.

A young officer was sprinting upwards towards her general direction, his face flushed and breathing labored in a manner that had Sue under the impression that this man desperately needed to find himself a treadmill and a grocery store who's selection didn't come with the option of the meals being super-sized straight from the get-go.

His arms were flailing frantically, gesturing towards her in an effort to catch her attention as she rolled her car up as close towards the police barricade inhibiting her entrance as she could get, half ready to barrel straight through it in an effort to speed things up a little bit…

After all, Figgins had always been a sucker towards the state's insistency upon conducting frequent and elaborate Emergency Action Plan drills… Of course, had it been up to her, she would have rendered such nonsense illegal years ago; after all, natural selection had gotten them this far thus far, who were they to start challenging it now?

Yet another reason that she should have been declared the principal of William McKinley High School as opposed to Figgins… at least in her professional opinion of the matter anyway.

But the closer she looked, the more she realized that this didn't seem like your average, every day fire drill… Sure, she had seen a similar proportion of ambulances in the William McKinley parking lot before; nobody was soon to forget that instance where she'd had her Cheerio's practicing in the stifling summer sun until each and every one of them had succumbed to heat exhaustion, and yes, they had proved that they could fit at least four fire trucks in the parent drop-off roundabout after an attempted experiment towards mixing all of her vitamin supplements had gone horribly awry, but this…

This was different.

Students were huddled upwards and against each other throughout the length of the quad, embracing and holding onto each other's hands as they submitted to being lead by a clutter of police officers towards a row of school buses that extended the length of the block, one tearing itself away from the rest every couple of minutes, rapidly transporting its students to wherever it was that they were going…

Directly in front of her, she had suddenly realized that even if she had broken through the police barricade with the force of her car, she wouldn't have made it very far…Pressed up against the plethora of _Do Not Cross_ signs lay a sea of frantic parents; a crowd that extended so far down the length of the block that Sue couldn't even make out where it ended from the spot where she stood…

Each and every one of them were flailing wildly, tears streaking down the lengths of their faces as they attempted to push past each other and towards the school, each screaming in their apparent frenzy, each asking the exact same thing –

"_Where's my kid?_"

Ambulances were squeezing themselves as tightly as they could possibly manage into the already cramped teacher's parking lot, but for every one that actually left the scene, there were at least five more coming in right behind them for replacement…

And all the while, special forces roamed up and down the length of the scene in its entirety; army men clutching onto their M-16's, SWAT members armored head to toe in bullet proof gear, guns drawn and pointed towards the general direction of the high school that Sue Sylvester had left peacefully behind mere hours before…

She should have known that this would have happened; she leaves the school for a few hours and all hell breaks loose… Whatever it was that was currently happening within those familiar walls, Sue was certain that it was the glee club to be blamed for all of this chaos; and hell, even if it wasn't, this seemed like a perfect opportunity to frame them as if was, maybe even get them disbanded…

"Listen, buddy," Sue snapped suddenly towards the officer currently attempting to inhibit her entrance into the high school that really was practically hers anyway. "I'm the one that runs this joint over here, so how about you quit squawking in gibberish that I can't understand and tell me what the hell is going on in here! I have a protein shake that I have to drink, and I can feel my muscles deteriorating as we speak, so you have approximately ten seconds to answer me; go."

Suddenly, this officer had begun looking at her as if she had sprouted three heads…

"You mean, you don't know?" His professionalism faltered momentarily, voice dropping several octaves as his eyes pointed steadily inside of her own… And despite the fact that she would never actually admit to it, Sue's heart gave a sudden, painful lurch, one that she'd attempted to hide with her relentlessly stony glare although had the officer not been so previously distracted, he would have been able to caught it easily…

"Don't know what? Listen buddy, I've been stuck in a Detroit hell-hole since six o'clock this morning trying to restock on my protein shakes, what the hell am I supposed to know?" She spat harshly, masking her fear with a façade of erratic anger.

"Ms. Sylvester…" He swallowed so heavily that Sue was able to follow the movement of the bollus straight down the length of his esophagus…

And in his temporary descent away from a professional maturity, away from the iron grip that he'd previously been placing on his strong front, Sue suddenly recognized him… He was a boy that couldn't have been graduated from William McKinley High School by any more than four or five years now, a feat that had suddenly became obvious given how childish his face had suddenly become…

"This morning at approximately 10:45 at least two individuals, believed to be students here at William McKinley High School opened fire upon the inhabitants of the campus." He spoke robotically, as if to word his statement with anything less than such a superficial tone would have just been too painful an act for him to commit to… But either way, for Sue, that didn't make actually hearing it any easier.

She refused to speak so much as a single word in response, didn't bother to remove her car from its self-appointed parking space in the middle of the street or even so much as shut it off before she was jumping outwards from the driver's seat, springing upwards and into the air where she pushed past the bewildered officer with ease and entered into a rabid sprint without so much as an idea as to where it was that she was going, but instead, an understanding towards the fact that her legs simply knew where it was that they should be taking her.

"M'ame, you can't go through there – m'ame!" She plowed easily through the tightly sealed line of men whose job it had been assigned to save them all despite the fact that they were currently simply squatting in strategic formation about the entranceways, waiting in game plan as if the shooters would actually consider simply walking out waving little white flags at any moment…

And despite the fact that they yelled for her, that they called her back ferociously, she ignored them alongside her ultimate decision to start taking matters into her own hands…

"M'ame, do not enter that school! Ms. Sylvester, it's not safe!" She could hear the shouts of warning swarming down throughout her general direction, hell, she had even managed to process them while simultaneously evaluating the consequences of her decisions in vivid detail… but she was mere footsteps away, and she wasn't about to stop; not now.

The sound of pounding footsteps ringing out from directly behind her signified the idea that an officer had been sent to chase her down, tackle her to the ground if that was what he had to do to prevent her from committing to single-handedly, the most foolish act that she had ever performed in her entire life…

But she knew that she couldn't bring herself to be too bothered with his presence… After all, she was having a hard enough time as it was keeping her own two feet planted firmly against the ground below her, so much as considering anybody else's without a doubt send her spiraling downwards in a manner that she just couldn't afford right now…

Besides, she wasn't exceptionally concerned; after all, he was impossibly weighted down with his heavy armor and a weapon that looked as if it might have been bigger than he was, and even despite this, she had always been swift – never mind the fact that she was currently running faster than she had ever ran in her entire life…

She'd had the clear advantage straight from the very beginning… that is, up until she had been no more than a mere arm's length from the entrance, up until she had made the foolish mistake of turning her head behind her in order to check the proximity of the officer behind her…

And suddenly, she saw it…

Sue Sylvester had never seen a dead body before.

Sure, she had dished out all of the stories to anybody willing to listen within a thirty mile radius all about how the movie _Braveheart_ had been entirely based off of her life story, and yes, she may have exaggerated the tales of the period in which Lima's hostile resident woodland population attempted to overrun the town to the point that the tale had ended with her viciously slaying them from the back of a noble white steed, but in the end, all those recounts had ever been were stories…

But now… well now that they were here, now that they were real, now that she had actually seen them, she just wished that she could be granted the opportunity to take it all back once more…

There was a stampeding hoard of individuals lined up and down the length of the pathway directly to her right, stamping frantically but at the same time, stepping precariously over the still body in the center of them all, adorned with a sheet that had been thrown half-hazard over his form so that it barely even covered him…

She thought of it as almost a cliché, strikingly offensive, even for her, towards the idea that they would resort to such an obvious, such an over-used manner of masking this mere child who deserved so much more than being made to look exceptionally smaller than he already was in his death.

She couldn't identify him based on her lack of immediate access to his most distinguishable features; in fact, the only thing that had even allowed her to identify him as male at all was a strong, albeit motionless arm protruding from the edge of one of the sheets corners and a brand new pair of Air Jordan's peaking upwards from the end, a direct result of the linen not being nearly large enough to completely mask his still frame.

Directly above him, paramedics clamored strategically, forming an impressively lengthy assembly line in an effort to shuffle the needed equipment to and from the three additional bodies strewn across the lawn whom had been lucky enough not to have been covered with a plain white sheet. Police officers scrambled for evidence, evaluating every square inch of every sidewalk tile as they carefully plucked shotgun shells from the blades of grass. Crime scene investigators were taking pictures of everything, of everyone from every angle…

This was too much… it was all too much.

"What the hell do you think you're doing?"A harsh voice snapped her abruptly back into her world, one which left her strikingly aware of the idea that in her briefest second of hesitation, the police officer that had been chasing her down full tilt had managed to catch up to her, approaching her with an angry tone and a firm hand against her shoulder as he attempted to pull her back, to bring her towards the ever-growing crowds of terrified friends and family waiting anxiously for news on those they loved still trapped inside…

No; she couldn't be like them… Sue Sylvester had never been one to take kindly to merely sitting around and waiting, and today was no exception… in fact, it was the least of them all.

"You're lucky I don't have you arrested!" The officer continued his scolding of her but she was past the point of concern as her mind bubbled with the best possible escape route from within his grasp… There would be no way around a physical altercation, she knew that, and as she quickly evaluated where the best place to strike around his layer of bullet proof armor would be, she figured she'd worry about the inevitable assault on an officer charge later…

This was important; much, much more important.

Flattening her palm expertly, she tensed the muscles in her hand taut, delivering upwards, a swift, harsh chop that landed with a striking accuracy directly underneath his plated helmet and dead center against his throat.

The blow resonated in its success as the officer took a raspy inward gasp that left him inhaling fruitlessly as all the air was temporarily rushed outward from the depth of his windpipe; and just as Sue had anticipated, his natural instinct had his hand quickly reaching upwards to grasp at his aching throat and away from its previously restricting grasp against Sue's shoulder, leaving the woman free to complete what she had started, as she ripped open the heavy double doors and skirted her way inside of William McKinley High School in a manner of mere seconds.

The instant that the door had closed behind her, she couldn't help but feel as if she had entered an entirely different world all together…

The pandemonium, the pure, unadulterated chaos of the world stationed directly outside of these closed walls had disappeared in its entirety, replaced instead by a complete and utter silence that left an uncomfortable chill radiating directly up the length of Sue's spine.

She stepped tentatively further into the familiar school, eyes wide and head constantly swiveling as she evaluated her surroundings for any signs of life whatsoever… But she didn't see anybody, she didn't hear anything… and for the life of her, she couldn't decide whether this was a good thing, or a bad one.

For all of the attention that she was pouring into her every step, it was a miracle in itself that she hadn't noticed the body of Michael Rosario laying motionlessly against the floor at the head of the main staircase until she'd stepped directly on top of him…

He recoiled with a violent scream that had shocked Sue back into attention harder than the actual act of stepping on him had done…

Jumping backwards automatically, her eyes scoured immediately over the boy currently laying at her feet, scanning across his form as he automatically began to scramble in his retreat from the unexpected presence of a person that he could no longer be certain hadn't just come here to hurt him… But ultimately, he'd failed to achieve that essential bout of locomotion, settling instead to curl upwards and into a protective fetal position, desperate to prevent any more harm from befalling upon him than what already had…

The first thing that Sue had looked for was the blood; after all, if he was lying here down against the ground, refusing to move, refusing to save his own life, he had to have been impossibly injured… right?

But she grew immediately confused upon her lack of identifying those characteristic, deep red puddles that she'd always seen in the movies but never in real life…

She moved down the length of his body, prowling for injuries that became obvious the further downward her eyes travelled; his right ankle twisted painfully underneath him, leaving the allusion that his foot was literally detached internally from his leg in its entirety…

Sue glanced up and down the surroundings, easily putting two and two together as she evaluated the steep staircase whose base Michael was currently laying at… But of course, she had already been proven wrong today once before when she'd woken up and believed her biggest problem of the day to be the fact that she no longer had any protein shakes… She wasn't willing to take that risk again, so she decided to ask him anyway.

"What happened?" She spoke abruptly, harshly even, begging the boy to answer with a similar sense of urgency in a motion exemplified by her violent shaking of his shoulders.

"I was… I was…" He choked over his own words, pain and fear lacing beneath his stuttering voice. "I was leaving English class… on my way to lunch… This girl, I don't know who she was… I think she might be a senior, she… she had a girl pinned in the corner… You know, that weird girl from the glee club that everybody's always throwing Slushies at… She shot her… she shot her, and I think… I think she might have killed her so I ran… But I tripped. I tripped and my ankle… oh God, my ankle…"

Sue released the white knuckled grip that she had upheld against the boy's shoulders throughout the length of his recollection of events and stood slowly upwards from her previously crouched position.

"Wait…" Michael called back to her, eyes suddenly widened in terror towards the idea that Sue's intentions weren't to stay here and help him. "Wait, you're leaving me here?"

"You'll be fine." Sue stated in a matter-of-fact manner although it were obvious despite the fact that she herself couldn't be certain about it; not for him, not for her, not for anybody. "Get yourself behind this stairwell; stay hidden. The police will be here soon."

She turned away from him, her priorities set upon locating those that had been more mortally wounded than a kid that had been stupid enough to trip over his own two feet in his bid for escape and break his ankle.

She walked briskly away from Michael Rosario's side, stepping on the balls of her feet the entire time that she was moving, her heels never once touching the ground below her as she followed a chronicled trail up the stairwell, the evidence of the direction that the shooters had travelled in obvious in the form of miscellaneous blood splatters and stray penetrating wounds in the shape of bullet holes riddled across the walls, the floors, the ceiling, everywhere…

She'd tried to imagine what this setting must have been like what couldn't have been any more than five or ten minutes ago now, tried to imagine what it might feel like to stand amidst a crowd of your peers, cramped like sardines and all rushing to escape down the same narrow staircase as an explosion of gunfire rained down directly behind you, leaving you able to only pray that you wouldn't become the next to feel that lead punch pierce through your skin and bring you hopelessly down against the ground mere seconds away from freedom…

Sue smelled the blood before she'd actually seen it; a prominent stench that lingered in such copious amounts with that characteristic irony tang that she could literally taste it on the tip of her tongue…

Swallowing hard, she coated the inside of her mouth with a layer of saliva in an effort to wash the taste from her mouth as she came to an abrupt pause at the head of the staircase before transitioning her previously steady pace into a brutal crawl as she extended her ears outward in an attempt to evaluate whether or not she might find herself running into somebody that she did not particularly want to run into right now…

It took her several distinct seconds to actually bring herself to take those additional steps forward, and even then, she'd done so with a tremendous trepidation, her heart pounding so harshly against her chest that she truly feared the idea that her own body might traitorously attract unwanted attention upon herself.

Her feet skidded to an abrupt halt directly around the length of the corner in an automatic response towards the oceans of blood spilled and streaked across the otherwise spotless tile in an absolute portrait of the exact consequences of what happened when some of the world's best creations went horribly, horribly wrong…

The collection was prominent, thick against the stark white tiles so that it was left little sparkling beneath the glow of the overhead lights above.

She could feel herself unintentionally gagging, the site in itself enough to leave her sick to her stomach in its prominence; the infinitely deep puddles, the stray splotches that had managed to travel an impressive distance from its original site down the length of the hallway…

It wasn't until she had noticed the clear-cut trails reminiscent of a heavy object being dragged away from the scene and what appeared to be at least two distinct sets of footprints outlined in the blood splotched sporadically in every which direction that she realized, despite the seemingly large magnitude of blood, there weren't actually any bodies behind to claim it…

She stood confused for a brief moment; after all, there was no way in hell that a single person could have lost that much blood and still managed to get up and walk away… But finally, amidst the chaotic array of footprints mirroring the hallways now destroyed centerpiece, she managed to make out a clear cut pattern; an actual trail of footprints leading from the spot that she currently stood, straight into a closed classroom door directly adjacent to her.

With one final scan up and down the length of the hallway in an effort to ensure its safety, she tip-toed slowly towards the door, the only sound her body produced being the squeaking of her permanently destroyed white sneakers against the slick floor below her…

Her initial thought in regards to her approaching of the doorway before her was that it was empty; after all, she couldn't make out so much as a single sound being emitted from within, and with all of the overhead lights shut off, the space was dimmed to a darkness only penetrated by the soft glow of the high-noon sunlight…

It was only after she'd peered through the small window embedded inside of the doorframe that she'd realized how truly wrong she had been…

She evaluated the scene quickly in one sweeping, initial glance so that the first person she'd identified became the first person she'd invested the entirety of her attention on; none other than William Schuester himself so that her brain couldn't help but take the automatic instinct to think of a highly inappropriate, offensive remark towards his personal appearance.

_I always knew that he was gay._

It was the first thought that her mind had managed to produce; what, with Will shirtless on his knees and Finn Hudson hovering incessantly over his shoulder, she just couldn't help herself…

But slowly, she began to process the extent of the scene, the details surrounding Will's currently questionable positioning coming into light before her very eyes so that she had no choice but to perform a double take…

And when she did, she knew that she couldn't have possibly been to blame for her initial assumption; after all, the object that Will was currently pressing his discarded shirt – balled up inside of his clenched fists – against was so tiny, so impossibly miniscule that nobody could have possibly identified it as a human body upon first glance…

Her eyes had become so accustomed to blood in these past several minutes that she hadn't even processed the liquid surrounding the small group as thus upon first glance… However, as she soaked in its prominence, followed its impossible pattern splotched up and down the lengths of Will's arms and drenching his permanently destroyed shirt, she couldn't help but wonder how she'd missed it at first…

Because no matter what Will did, and no matter how hard he tried to achieve success, the blood didn't seem to want to stop flowing in rivers from the chest of a young girl who's life, Sue had helped to make a living hell throughout the majority of the past year…

No, her first initial suspicion told her that Rachel Berry was long dead; and through closed eyes, a face so pale that she blended to the exact with the sterile white of her surroundings, and blood pouring from a spot-on wound that seemed to have struck her directly in the center of her chest, she could have easily passed as such…

But the harder she searched for any signs of life from the girl, the more she realized that, by some sort of miracle, Rachel Berry had been spared; for now, that was… Of course, that didn't mean that they didn't need to get her out of this school as soon as humanly possible if she wanted so much as a prayer's chance of staying that way…

Sue's hand lingered against the doorknob where she moved as quietly as humanly possible, twisting the handle before giving the wooden plank a sharp thrust inward where it was met with an immediate resistance, striking against an object weighing it down from within the room with a tremendous bang that sent the three conscious occupants of the room scurrying in their fear, muscles tensing and arms automatically flinging over their heads protectively – the only means by which they could think of to cover themselves should the bullets start flying…

But for the first time in her life, Sue hadn't run into William Schuester with the sole intention of belittling him and his glee club emotionally, and occasionally, physically as well… No, today, instead of destroying them, Sue Sylvester was going to save them; and with a sudden burst, she couldn't help but find herself appalled with the idea that it always seemed to be the worst that managed to bring out the very best in her.

Sue searched for Will's eyes, begging him to make direct eye contact with hers so that when they finally did, she couldn't help but notice the prominent flash of recognition followed by an immediate tidal of relief that had washed across them…

She signaled with her hand quickly, beckoning for him to come and let her inside before anybody came barreling around the corner looking to finish them all off for good…

She could tell that his entire body was trembling even as he stood to his feet clear across the room; a trait that she attempted to poke fun at him for, simply for the sake of lightning her mood, but she couldn't… not with the blood prominently visible against the skin of his hands, his arms, splattered like art work clear across his white undershirt…

But despite her commitment towards backing away from a clear opportunity of William Schuester degradation, she couldn't help but notice that his hands had been shaking so hard that he could barely push the offending bookshelf away from its position blocking the doorway…

He struggled briefly, his trembling palms leaving streaky handprints outlined in blood along the wooden panels of the bookshelf as he pushed it just enough to allow Sue to slip quickly inside…

"William." She addressed him sharply, shocked even at herself towards the casualness by which her words slipped from her mouth as she closed the door silently behind her and advanced several paces into the classroom in an effort to evaluate the situation for what it truly was.

"What are you doing here, Sue?" Will asked; his voice stony and cold in the evidence of his highly elevated guard… Sue could only imagine that the experience of watching one of his own students lingering on the border between life and death must have done this to him, must have made him like this; lifeless, emotionless, outwardly resilient to everything that the world had to offer towards him.

And for the first time in her entire life, Sue saw a little piece of herself inside of the uncharacteristically dead eyes of William Schuester… She saw it in every one of them as she scanned the faces of those throughout the room… more so than anyone else the boy stuck at the head of the room, the boy that Sue, upon her first initial sweep of the room, hadn't even noticed…

Everybody knew who Jamie Porter was… that is, everybody knew Jamie Porter as the hopeless loser who was willing to be relentlessly used by his fellow peers strictly for the sake of being able to call them his friends…

But not today; today, Jamie Porter was cold; he was lifeless amidst the literal characterization that had befallen upon him so that she knew he hadn't been blessed with the luck that Rachel Berry had received inside of this hopeless classroom…

He was dead and no matter what any of them so much as attempted to do, he wasn't coming back; not now, not ever.

All around her, she could see flashes of individuals starkly reminiscent of her past self transforming into her future right before her very eyes… You see, like them she used to be so much bigger than this, she used to be so much better than this… It's hard to believe now, but Sue Sylvester used to be alive, she used to be optimistic, she used to hold so much faith between the seemingly bottomless cup of her palms…

Now her biggest concern was the idea that these kids were suddenly destined to become no better than the cynical, broken mess that she herself had grown up into… entire futures, destroyed in an instant.

"I followed the scent of the obscene amount of product that you seem to have placed in your hair today, William." She shook her head from her deepest of thoughts, using her temporary memory lapse into weakness to build up her strongest defense mechanism yet, emitting it in the form of an arrogant teasing she just couldn't bring herself to avoid. "It lead me right to you, you should consider yourself lucky that it was me who showed up and not anybody actually dangerous, especially considering the fact that you were stupid enough to lock yourself and your students inside of a classroom with no way out and a clear-cut trail leading right to you."

Will's mouth dropped downward in the sheer shock of what Sue was currently dishing out to him, so stunned towards the idea that she would be railing into him at a moment like this that he couldn't even bring himself to come up with anything to say in response, leaving him speechless, and Sue free to continue her self-therapeutic degradation of her fellow teacher despite everything that her mind was yelling at her to stop.

"You are aware of the idea that the WMHS teacher's handbook that we receive at the beginning of every new school year states that by protocol, in cases of emergency, which William, this easily classifies as, you're actually supposed to _help_ the student that needs it…" Her eyes subconsciously drifted past Will's shoulders, glancing quickly across Jamie's body at one end of the room and onto Rachel's, fading steadily towards the same direction at the other.

She kept her peripherals firmly upon Will the entire time, watching as the muscles surrounded his eyes quickly began twitching with rage so that she could tell that he understood exactly what it was that she was trying to get at…

"Don't go there, Sue." He muttered, his voice lowering into a whisper as to attempt to get her to follow his dynamic lead and prevent those surrounding them from hearing a conversation that they couldn't bring themselves to confront at the moment. "I swear to God, the last thing that I need, the last thing that any of us need right here is for you to come strolling in here and make everything even worse than what it already is… So if you're not going to help us get Rachel out of this school, then maybe you should just leave."

"Oh William," She skirted past the idea that Will had just made it clear that he was perfectly willing to leave her stranded like a sitting duck all by herself in the center of this hall, silently praising the idea that he truly had possessed the capacity to stand up for his students all along… "Are you finished ranting in garble that I just can't understand right now, because I'm not sure if you've noticed, but one of your students is dying right in front of you… So listen, if you want her to have a prayer's chance of surviving, if any of you want to have a prayer's chance of surviving, you'll follow me, and you'll do it now."

She turned herself onto the idea of possessing an attitude that was actually productive but continued to clutch desperately onto her dark humor, her desire to hold onto anything close to a sense of normalcy obvious in her bid to keep herself from falling into the pitfalls of absolute insanity .

And if her tactics of preventing current self-destruction came at the expense of all of the other people surrounding her, well so be it.

She watched as Will swiveled his head backwards and over his own shoulder, turning towards the cluster of people lingering behind them; Shelby Corcoran replacing him in the job that he had previously enacted upon himself as she clutched Will's button down firmly against her daughter's chest in a desperate attempt to stop the bleeding while all the while, Finn stood idly by, clutching onto the girl's hand in a strict act of moral support, supporting the girl through her ever moment, just in case this one would be her last.

Turning back towards Sue, the only thing he could offer her was a curt nod of the head; the briefest of indications that he had actually heard her, and understood what she was trying to say before he stepped away, drifting between Shelby and Finn where he laid a gentle hand against Shelby's shuddering shoulders, shaking due to the sheer force of the pressure that she was currently placing against Rachel's wounds…

"Come on," Will spoke gently, whispering so that Sue could barely hear him from her position across the room. "We're getting out of here."

"Will…" Shelby spoke hesitantly, her motherly instinct screaming against the idea of bringing her daughter back out and into the open hallways swarming with blood-thirsty gunmen… Of course, staying put clearly hadn't gotten them very far either, so here she had entered; a vicious catch 22 of sorts…

But they had waited long enough to try and rectify this; it was time to act…

"It'll be okay, Shelby." Will was speaking to the woman before him, but at the same time, had turned in the midst of his words to lock eyes for Sue – a silent confirmation towards the idea that despite everything, he trusted her. "We'll be safe… she'll be safe, don't worry."

He waited only briefly for a response from Sue, watching her nod quickly in the recognition that she had picked up on his actions before he'd turned back towards the second woman before him, watching as she paused only momentarily in consideration of Will's seemingly flawless confidence…

Her arms relaxed by a miniscule, yet noticeable amount as she strategically rearranged her stance; her body language indicative of the fact that she trusted Will, and she trusted his decisions as she slid her hands beneath Rachel's prone body in an attempt to lift the girl into her arms…

But Shelby Corcoran couldn't have been much larger than her petite daughter lying before her… she struggled with the additional weight, and while she may have found it if not easy, at the very least doable to bring her the ten feet from the hallway into this classroom, her struggle with the additional weight was obvious; carrying her to safety seemed impossible – a failure that became evident by the tears of defeat burning against her eyes.

"Here, Ms. Corcoran…"Finn stepped forwards nobly, arms stretched outwards in his indication to allow Shelby to pass her child into them. "I'll keep her safe."

She evaluated the boy for the briefest of seconds, quickly assessing whether or not she actually trusted somebody other than herself with a cargo so precious, but in the end, Finn must have passed her rigorous standards, because ultimately, Shelby released the girl from her firm grip, allowing him to collect her comfortably into his chest where she shifted only slightly and automatically curled her body upwards and closer into him…

"Finn…" Sue had been so shocked to have actually heard Rachel speak that she allowed herself to jump in shock in response to even her softest voice as it arose from depths of Finn Hudson's arms so that it blew like a mere wind across Sue's ears, so quiet that she'd found herself forced to listen to the echo just to truly distinguish between the words…

"Shh, Rachel don't talk…" The boy shushed her quickly as he repositioned his arms more firmly beneath her, paying extra attention to detail, ensuring that she was nestled both safely and comfortably between them.

"But I need to tell you something…" She muttered feebly, her words barely grazing off of her lips, impossibly chapped and rapidly fading into a deep shade of blue as her life was sucked more vigorously from her body with each drop of blood that spilled from within it…

In fact, from where Finn had positioned her, raised prominently upwards against his unusually tall frame, to Sue, it almost appeared as if a steady rain had fallen from directly beneath her; clear droplets of red forming puddles, rivers, oceans against the world below.

"Okay…" He nodded, pausing in his motions in order to lean his head closer downwards and towards Rachel; and Sue knew that she should have rushed him; she should have told him that they needed to move quickly, but she couldn't… not when this was quite possibly the last chance that they had.

And in a rush of jealousy towards the idea that had it been her bleeding to death in the middle of a classroom floor there would be nobody to love her enough to stay behind amidst the danger, she lingered, she listened, and she allowed them to have if but a single moment for each other.

"Can you tell them that I was brave?" She murmured against Finn's chest as the boy turned his head inwards, pointing his eyes down and towards her so that Sue could only just make out the flash of a single tear lingering in the corners of her eyes.

"Tell who?"

"Tell… everybody…" She breathed her words slowly in terms of single syllables, speaking through a shudder of pain that forced her to recoil naturally, falling further inside of Finn's arms in a matter that Sue was sure, neither of them really minded.

"You are brave, Rachel." He assured the girl quickly, and for once in her life, Sue had to agree with him; despite the fact that her first impressions of Rachel Berry hadn't been nearly so high before today, she now had no doubt in her mind that the girl was anything less than a trite and true example of bravery. "You're so brave, Rach… we all know it, we all think it…"

"Don't leave me okay?" Her off-topic plea came out high-pitched, almost squeaky, and in his response, Sue couldn't help but notice Finn's hands clench subconsciously tighter around Rachel's tiny frame.

"I'm not going to leave you." He promised, and for the life of her, Sue couldn't remember ever hearing such a remarkable tone of confidence, of honesty behind anybody's voice ever before.

"I don't wanna be alone." She choked, the sob that she had involuntarily allowed to escape her lips forcing her to cringe and recoil in her pain so that her muscles grew so tense that she nearly slipped straight out of Finn's grasp.

"You're not alone." He assured her quickly. "I promise Rachel, you're not alone… You have me, and you have Mr. Schue, and Shelby… we're all here for you, okay?" Sue couldn't help but notice the fact that Finn had conveniently left her name out of his recount of the verbal attendance record, but she couldn't bring herself to be too offended by her absence. "Don't worry Rachel, you don't have to be afraid, okay… I'm here, and I'm not gonna leave you. You'll never be alone, I promise."

"Finn," Sue watched as, to her utmost surprise, it became Will who ultimately approached Finn, cautiously placing a firm hand against his shoulder in an effort to guide him away from the plights of his dying girlfriend. "We have to go now, son."

He nodded slowly, his eyes never leaving Rachel's frame once as he slowly turned, moving with carefully truncated steps as if he were carrying a porcelain doll …

Sue lead the chorale, stepping carefully outwards and into the hallway, head barely peeking out from beyond the door frame as she searched up and down the length of the corridor for any signs of life, waiting several moments in the silence before ultimately deeming it clear, signaling for the rest to follow her suite.

She held the door carefully for the remainder of the group, eyes continuously scanning back and forth across the hall as Finn shuffled carefully past her, followed immediately by Shelby… It was only after several seconds had passed with still no sign from Will that she turned back into the room.

He was at the head of the classroom, struggling visibly with the body of the boy that must have been at least five inches taller than him while outweighing him by a solid thirty pounds… He tried to lift the dead Jamie Porter upwards and into his arms, tried to bring the boy out like he deserved rather than leaving him alone, trapped in the depths of an abandoned classroom, left to rot…

But his attempts were futile, Sue knew that, she could see it, and truthfully, she believed that Will did too… They couldn't linger on the dead right now; they just couldn't; not when they had to invest so much time into the living.

"Will," She called back to him, addressing him for the first time in her life that she could possibly remember with a tone of understanding rather than one of glistening malice. "Leave him… We can't have the extra weight."

Her words perhaps, would have sounded harsh to an outsider, but truthfully, that wasn't how she had intended them to; and she could tell by the way in which Will slowly nodded as he hesitantly abandoned his effort that he understood that.

They walked in a tight circle about each other, heads continuously turning in every which direction as they expected to meet their deaths with every corner that they turned, with every ringing gunshot that they heard… But judging by the relative distance of the bangs, Jacob and Suzy were currently confined to the opposite end of the school; as long as they moved swiftly, they expected to be met with little to no resistance…

They attempted to ignore their surroundings, attempted to enforce a tunnel vision strictly in terms of their own escape, but for every single body that they'd passed lying dead on the floor, for every speck of blood, for every bullet shell rolling across the ground, they couldn't help but to allow a split second's hesitation, their eyes dancing across the latest additions to their school as they stepped carefully over them…

By the time they had reached the door, it might as well have been framed with gold it looked so inviting.

With a collective breath of relief audible between the small group, they stood before their safe haven, tears of pure joy stinging at their eyes towards the idea that this nightmare was now over in its immediate, that now that they had successfully escaped with their lives, they could now focus on the aftermath…

"We're safe, Rachel…" Sue could hear Finn speaking animatedly downward towards his girlfriend, but the girl never responded; she had been long past the point of conscious speech, Sue knew that, but judging by Finn's refusal to cease talking to her, he had yet to do so. "You're going to be okay now, Rachel. Just hold on. Just be strong for a few more minutes… we're saved now."

Finn Hudson quickly became the first to exemplify his mad dash towards the double doors, taking his final steps in steep strides so that he was practically leaping, leaving him arriving at the door in a matter of four or five swift steps.

Shelby skirted quickly at his feet, her refusal to allow her daughter to so much as leave her sight prominent as she pushed the door open and into the sunlight, guiding Finn quickly through as she shuffled him outside where they both disappeared in a rush of light that Sue's eyes could barely even process, let alone adjust to anymore.

Beyond their backs, another series of gunshots echoed; distant, yet closer than where they had been before so that Will and Sue knew that it wouldn't be wise for them to linger for too much longer.

Taking a quick step forwards, Will shortened the distance between himself and the front door, allowing himself to take several paces forward before he paused, finally realizing that Sue wasn't following him…

"Are you coming?" He asked, and she swallowed in her answer as she considered the depth of his question momentarily, trying to decide exactly what her answer was going to be… She should have gone, she knew that she should have gone, but at the same time, she knew that if she had indeed followed Will through those doors right now, she would never truly be able to survive this ordeal in its entirety… not when she would be spending the rest of her life bogged down by the cowardice that her retreat would cause.

"No," She answered after a few short moments, "No Will, I think that I'm going to stay behind… see if anybody else needs somebody to lead them out."

"Okay…" Will accepted her answer for what it was but at the same time, he couldn't help but to be a little bit hesitant about leaving her behind; and as surprised as Sue was by this fact, she could have sworn that she saw something resembling a hint of concern glimmer behind his eyes in response.

"What you did today was good, Sue." He finally nodded, delivering to her the praise that he knew he would need to get off of his chest just in case this was his last opportunity to do so. "You might have saved Rachel's life today… You sure as hell saved the rest of ours… Just be careful, okay."

"I can look after myself, William." She responded with a lack of emotional attachment but still, delivered to him a nod of mutual understanding as Will turned his back and followed everybody else out of the front door and back into the open air.

For a brief moment, Sue was overwhelmed by the sense of absolute silence that had suddenly come across her.

There was not a single individual around her, not a single noise surrounding her… The gunshots had since disappeared into silence, the screams dwindled into obsoleteness in the representation of the fact that all of the people that were now left inside of the school with her were either dead, or else so mortally wounded that they couldn't bring it inside of themselves to achieve escape.

Her vision tunneled in around her in a sharp breath of air that registered to her brain as being so cold that it physically stung at her lungs as she tried desperately to assess her next move, tried desperately to map out her most appropriate course of action…

A trail of scattered debris lead her carefully from the main entrance; backpacks, papers, notebooks… the ground was littered with the scattered reminder that this school had once been a mere inhabitant of students learning, rather than students fleeing for their lives…

At the end of the hall, a single pair of sneakers told Sue that at least one student had been so desperate for freedom that he had run clear out of his shoes without so much as looking back to retrieve them.

It would have been so easy for her to turn around, to follow Will out and relish on the idea that she had potentially saved four lives today… But at the same time, she knew that she could never be satisfied with merely settling. There were still so many people left inside, still so many lives hanging in the balance…

A piercing scream that originated from the very end of the adjacent hallway told Sue Sylvester exactly what her next destination was going to be; and despite the fact that any normal reaction would be to run away, to flee from an expression of such terror, Sue swallowed her fear, and instead, she followed it.

She moved slowly, scissor-stepping on her tip toes as she pressed her back firmly up against the tile walls in an effort to make herself as small as humanly possible…

She took every step at a mere crawl, turned every corner slower than a sleeping snail; but as she moved, she ran into nothing, she saw nobody… She took such tentative steps across her recluse of abandon that for a solid five minutes, she'd actually believed herself to have been trapped inside of some crazy science fiction movie…

But then, she finally heard it.

"Did you see her fall?"

Sue stopped walking so abruptly that her previously pristinely kept sneakers, now caked with blood, squeaked harshly against the ground in a manner that she cursed immediately despite the fact that whoever it was that was around the corner, didn't seem to have actually noticed.

"Oh _help_ me," She identified the voice as male in his swooning as he mocked whoever it was that he had just shot to the ground. "Help me, I've fallen, oh no!"

"Do you think that they're dead?" There was a second voice, a female this time, as she inquired towards the boy not out of concern, but instead out of a genuine interest towards whether or not her intentions were successful.

"It doesn't really matter now, they're gonna die."

Holding her hand up and against her mouth in an effort to inhibit so much as the tone of her breathing from escaping into the shooters' ears, she edged carefully as close to the corner as she possibly could without being seen.

She chanced a fleeting glimpse around the corner; her heart pounding with the fear of not what it was that she would see, but who would see her in return; and with an audible sigh of relief that pressed a stream of hot air into the palm that she held still firmly clamped against her mouth, she saw the two brooding forms, hunched shoulders, guns in hand, and thankfully, backs turned towards her.

Sue lingered for a moment, the idea in mind being that if she couldn't be seen, she could risk extending her glance an additional fraction of a second in an effort to evaluate the statuses of the two victims that had been lying on the floor at their tormentors feet.

Sue had never truly had any kind of physical interaction with Judith Klamm before despite the fact that the woman had been a teacher at William McKinley High School longer than herself…

She had been the head of the special needs program at the school, and given how near and dear to Sue's heart the special needs program had always been, Sue had allowed Judith to slip from the burden of her constant insults in a silent tone of the respect that she held for the woman.

Directly besides her, curled up in a knot of tangled limbs lay her single most well-known student… Greta Cohen was known throughout the entirety of the town of Lima, Ohio simply as the girl who had crawled out of her crib in the middle of the night when she was two years old and had somehow managed to sneak outside into her backyard where she fell into the family pool.

She had been clinically dead for thirty six minutes before her parents had actually found her, but, by some sort of miracle, she'd survived despite the fact that she had been left severely, and permanently brain damaged…

Sue's eyes glanced timidly upwards in her attempts to identify the two animals who would ever so much as possibly consider placing harm upon such a defenseless target, eyes straining in an attempt to identify them despite the fact that their backs were still turned towards her.

The first child had been an easy one to identify; after all, there was no mistaking that plethora of red curls as anybody else other than Jacob Ben-Israel.

She'd known the boy for years, particularly due to his relentless gossip-mongering of her Cheerios as well as one particularly awkward confrontation on the day that she had caught him with a pair of Rachel Berry's underwear in his locker.

"Jesus, shut up!" He screamed violently downwards towards the writhing, sobbing body of Judith Klamm, delivering a firm kick into her midsection that silenced her in her entirety. "Why aren't you dead yet?"

"I think that she might be now…" The girl breathed out as if in amazement towards the fact, turning only slightly so that Sue managed to catch a fleeting glimpse of her profile.

For the life of her, she couldn't remember the name of the girl. Of course she had seen her about the hallways, and yes, she had been known by the teachers of William McKinley High School as that girl that had had such a frenzied crush over Will Schuester that she'd sent herself to the hospital…

Sue had always known that the girl had been a little bit off… she just wished that she'd thought to do something about it before today…

Pushing herself back firmly against the wall, she embedded a complete map of the scene firmly into her mind, breathing heavily and eyes wide in her attentiveness as she attempted to plot what her best next plan of action would be…

She needed to do something; they all needed for her to do something…

Silently, she slipped her sneakers from her feet, the reminder that she didn't need the extra noise standing out strikingly in the back of her head as she made the final, abrupt decision to take matters into her own hands, exact a confrontation that would either leave her a hero, or leave her dead.

She didn't so much as breathe; not once as she instigated her initial approach… Instead, she gathered up all of the expended energy that she would have otherwise used on respiration and placed it upon sizing up her victims, deciding which one would she would be better off going for first, and had to ward off one while dealing with the other.

She had picked Jacob as her go-to guy in the immediate; the idea that he was more of a threat than Suzy, more violent than Suzy, obvious … Yes, she would go straight for Jacob while simultaneously just praying on the fact that she was banking on; that Suzy would remain too stunned by her presence long enough for her to knock Jacob Ben-Israel to the ground, to disarm him…

Of course, her entire plan was hit or miss, but at this point, she had absolutely nothing to lose, so with nothing but the years of martial arts training that she had committed to since birth to defend her against two kids stocked with an armory that rivaled that of the United States Army's strapped to their bodies, Sue made her final run at a swift stride, providing herself with the momentum that she needed as she struck Jacob Ben-Israel hard in the back of the head with her elbow.

The boy was knocked to the ground in a second, his grip loosening against his gun in his shock so that the weapon went skirting across the length of the hallway, just out of arm's reach from the young killer… Of course, Sue hadn't expected anything less; she had a very hard elbow, and a lot of experience delivering swift blows with it.

Her adrenaline pouring through her veins, turning her into a real-life superwoman, Jacob began his instinctual attempts at fighting back, flailing his balled fists up at the woman who was currently attempting to pin him defenselessly to the ground…

But Sue overpowered him easily; after all, hand-to-hand combat had never been Jacob's strong suite, a fact that had become obvious this morning upon his resorting to fire arms in order to exact his revenge…

"Suzy; Suzy, do something!"

_Suzy_… that was her name… She allowed the thought to briefly enter her mind, but for the most part kept her focus on Jacob as the boy struggled to keep Sue from achieving her efforts to acquire the spare pistol that Jacob held currently holstered in his belt, and when she didn't feel an immediate resistance from Suzy, strike her in the form of a bullet to the back of her head, she knew that her initial assumption that Suzy would be too shell-shocked to do much of anything was correct, she knew that somehow, someway, this crazy idea of hers might actually work.

All she had to do was get her hands on this gun… Then, Jacob would be completely unarmed, no longer a threat, allowing her to easily take Suzy out before the girl had the opportunity to snap back into reality… She had no intentions upon killing her; maybe just a quick shot to an arm or a leg, just to bring her down…

No, Sue figured that she would let the police, the state, the friends and family of all of the people that Jacob and Suzy had killed today deal with them themselves because despite her tough demeanor, and her insistency otherwise, Sue Sylvester was not a killer, never had been… It just wasn't in her blood; a trait that clearly separated her from the two murderous students currently surrounding her.

She had had her hand around the butt of Jacob's gun, had come mere seconds from achieving her goal until in an instant, out of nowhere, a sudden explosion of white hot pain caused a burst of stars and light to dance in front of her very eyes themselves…

Subconsciously, her grip slipped from the gun that she had just managed to remove from Jacob's belt, diminishing any chance of her achieving her goal in a split second.

She had been a fraction of a second too slow, she had overestimated the amount of time that she would have between attacking Jacob and Suzy's bounce back into reality; a reality that Sue became all too aware of as she fell to the ground below her, knocked out cold for a quick millisecond before her eyes finally focused on none other than Suzy Pepper, hovering before her with a stony anger in her eyes as she held her gun outwards in a manner that told Sue that she had just been knocked upside the head by the butt of Suzy's shotgun.

With a pang of defeat, Sue accepted her failure for what it truly was, relishing in its consequence as she allowed her fingers to graze a particularly painful spot against the back of her head and removed them only to see the now all-too-familiar glisten of blood against the pads of her fingertips.

Before her, Jacob had gotten shakily to his feet; clearly stunned, yet slowly regaining his previous threatening demeanor as he wiped the blood from his nose and backed away from Sue in order to collect his dislodged weaponry, leaving space for Suzy to swoop down in front of her, gun drawn so that now, instead of facing its end, Sue had found herself face-to-face with its barrel.

She'd felt as if she had just been doused with a bucket full of freezing cold water, the figurative liquid seeping through her very pores, turning her already cold mind into pure ice so that although she was fully aware of the idea that death was currently knocking at her very doorstep, she couldn't process the idea that it would manage to steal any capacity of innocence that she actually had left inside of her body.

"What happened to you Suzy?" She asked the girl… She hadn't exactly envisioned those to be her potential final words, but they had somehow managed to formulate themselves, slip from her mouth completely devoid of voluntary control. After all, if she was going to die here today, right here, right now, at the very least, she could have been given an explanation. "Who did this to you?"

"Life did this to me." Suzy spoke harshly and without hesitation, her voice cool, inhuman even as she steadied her arm, adjusted her aim carefully, and finally, pulled the trigger.


	14. Tina CohenChang

**Chapter 13**

**At the Bottom**

(Tina Cohen-Chang)

"Tina!"

The first conscious thought to actually drift across the foggy surface of her brain was a silent inquiry towards how it was exactly that she could have actually blacked out while still remaining standing firmly upright… She had no idea, yet somehow, it had happened.

The last thing that she remembered, she had been pressed up, stiff as a board against the underside of an overturned lunch table, her hands clutching Artie's upper arms so firmly that you could still see the half moon indentations against his skin made by her fingernails…

"Tina!"

She had come to, surfaced back into the realm of conscious thought only to find an entire ten minutes of her life mysteriously erased from the very depths of her memory; conscious visualizations fogged out, replaced with nothing but blackness…

And now… well now she'd found herself standing in the center of the cafeteria, her body so stiff that her muscles had literally begun to burn in protest; but still, she had absolutely no idea how it was that she had gotten there.

"Tina!"

The only feeling that she could possibly bring herself to register was that of her knees trembling painfully against one another.

The only picture that she could possibly bring herself to see was that of a blinding whiteness.

The only sound that she could possibly bring herself to hear was that of her own name being called… but she just couldn't seem to be able to distinguish with exactly who it was that that voice belonged to…

That is, until from across the school, the distant echoes of an overwhelming force penetrated through her already over-sensitized eardrums, so that the sound struck her with a blinding sense of sheer white light, forcing the previously regressed memories from their untold regions, trapped deep within the very center of her brain…

BANG!

* * *

><p><em>Jacob Ben-Israel had looked nothing short of defiant as his slug plunged directly into the center of Noah Puckerman's chest. <em>

_ He watched the scene progress onwards without a hint of concern as the mohawked boy stumbled backwards only briefly, clutching onto his chest as he toppled to the floor, mere inches away from the spot in which Quinn Fabray had fallen herself only moments before._

_ Jacob's eyes lingered only briefly, a soft smirk of satisfaction spreading across his features as he turned away from Puck and Quinn, casually wiping the barrel of his gun with his shirt, cleaning off the stray specks of blood that had been progressively littering it since this rampage had begun no more than twenty minutes ago now._

_He paused in the midst of his polishing; eyes focusing so pointedly against his position of interest that Tina could literally see his eyeballs dilating and constricting in their concentration as if she had been staring into the pupil of a machine the entire time._

_ In a slow, simultaneous movement, all eyes turned to follow Jacob's, all breaths hitched in a stony anticipation to find out who it was that Jacob Ben-Israel's next victim would be…_

_Tina herself had been so far away, that she couldn't help but wonder how it was that Jacob – standing several paces behind her – had even managed to see it from so far away… After all, even with her 20/20 vision, Tina had to squint in order to just make it out…_

_The image of a single foot, trembling violently as it stuck outwards from beyond the edge of its hiding place, behind the back of the corner vending machine._

* * *

><p>BANG!<p>

* * *

><p><em>Jacob hadn't even had to pause to aim; he knew that he would be able to strike his target easily regardless; and as it was, he did just that – with a painfully accuracy that removed Dorothy Kollo's protruding foot from the rest of her body in its entirety.<em>

_ With a shrill screech that emitted in a register nearly higher than what the human ear was actually capable of transmitting, Dorothy toppled sideways from beyond the cramped space between the soda machine and the wall, exposing herself from beyond the safety of what truly had been a remarkable hiding space…_

_Had she just managed to fit her entire body behind it…_

_Jacob barreled slowly; hunched in his demeanor, yet spacious in his pacing… He knew that Dorothy Kollo wasn't about to be running away anytime soon; they all knew that now._

_ In a silent understanding, he chose not to address her and she in turn, chose not to fight back; instead, she simply stared at Jacob, wide eyes so full of shock and fear that they couldn't even manage to produce tears._

_ His finger had just been flexing against the trigger, his mind prepared to finish exactly what it was that it had started, when they heard it; a dull thud emitted from the table adjacent, followed immediately by an involuntary grunt of pain that was emitted in a short staccato before it stopped, as if the owner of the voice had realized, just a split second too late, exactly what it was that it had done._

* * *

><p>BANG! BANG! BANG!<p>

* * *

><p><em>Edward Everest had not always been the brightest crayon in the box, but this time, he had really outdone even himself… <em>

_ He'd been trying to readjust his body; legs hopelessly asleep and turned into jelly from being cramped beneath a tiny lunch table so long… But he had underestimated his own height, overestimated how tall the table that he was currently sitting beneath actually was…_

_ When he'd hit his head harshly against the table's underside, the entire room had heard it… including Jacob._

_His body had exploded into a stream of blood as if it were coming from every surface of his body, as if it had previously existed inside of him in infinite amounts._

_ "If only…" Tina could remember that one distinct thought crossing her mind as she watched the boy writhing on the ground, while meanwhile, behind the table directly next to Edward; Renee Williams had begun eying her bleeding boyfriend with excessive worry evident behind her eyes._

_ Tina had become aware of the girl's intentions the second she had watched her vision begin to dart back and forth rapidly between Edward and the shooters; she was trying to find the right moment, trying to decide which precise second would least likely end in her death when she'd jump from her hiding spot in an effort to get to her boyfriend._

_ Jacob's back had been fully turned when that moment came… It was as if Renee had been presented with a golden ticket. It shouldn't have taken her more than five seconds to rush to her boyfriend's side, five seconds until she could hold onto him, until she could comfort him, until she could falsely assure him that everything was going to be okay…_

_Five seconds…_

_In retrospect, it was stupid for her to think that Jacob wouldn't see her… He would see her, he always saw._

_ They all understood that now._

* * *

><p>BANG!<p>

* * *

><p><em>A single bullet fired half hazard from across the room had taken Renee Williams' tiny frame down its entirety; and despite the fact that Edward Everest and Dorothy Kollo had been left wounded, well, at least they were still moving…<em>

_ Renee Williams wasn't moving, and from all that Tina could tell, she wasn't breathing either…_

_ No, it seemed at first glance that Jacob Ben-Israel had killed Renee Williams with a clear cut blow to the back of the head that had rendered her unconscious, and completely motionless against the ground; mere inches from her boyfriend's side._

* * *

><p>BANG!<p>

* * *

><p><em>He fired a single, random shot; a warning to encourage the imitation that these students sure as hell didn't need any more of right now… But the result was nothing more than a distant, empty clicking echoing from inside of the chamber.<em>

_ Jacob Ben-Israel's weapon was finally no longer loaded…_

_But it hadn't made a difference; the students of William McKinley High School were beyond the point of seeing this as a symbol of hope, of an approaching end…_

_ They had all been beyond the point of shell-shocked by now, they had all been done teasing themselves with the false hope that there was actually a possibility that they would escape._

_At this point, the only that they could truly do was wish that when the time came that Jacob Ben-Israel decided to kill them, he would at least do so quickly._

_Jacob toyed with the empty pistol briefly, spinning the weapon animatedly around his index finger by the trigger before placing it mockingly against his temple, pulling the trigger in rapid fire although the motion was met with nothing more than continuously rapid, empty clicking…_

_ Unlike the rest of them, Jacob would actually have the opportunity to decide whether or not he would become one of the lucky ones to achieve escape today._

"_Hey, let's get out of here." He spoke suddenly to Suzy, a nonchalant tone behind his voice that made it sound as if he could have been asking her to simply skip class with him or something. "We'll see if we can find anybody in the hallways… I think that we're done here."_

* * *

><p>BANG!<p>

* * *

><p><em>There was not a single person still alive inside of this room who wasn't holding their breaths; a collective inhale gathering across the length of the cafeteria, all waiting in stony anticipation for Suzy's response, waiting to see if there was actually a possibility after all, that they would be making it out of this school alive.<em>

_ "Yeah…" Suzy nodded her head in her agreement, and across the length of the room, you could literally feel the collective feeling of pure relief filtering across everybody's mind…_

_But none of them ever actually made a sound… they didn't dare to._

* * *

><p>"TINA!"<p>

Tina's mind sweltered slowly back into consciousness with a rapid force that almost knocked her straight down and onto the ground below her feet…

She stumbled backwards in a series of uncoordinated steps, pausing only upon being met with a solid force; the cool metal behind her back telling her that she had just come into direct contact with Artie's wheelchair…

But she couldn't bring herself to turn to face him; she couldn't bring herself to turn to face anybody that was still here, that was somehow still alive within these walls…

No, ironically enough, the only people that she could actually bring herself to meet eye-to-eye was the dead; and despite the fact that before this day, she had found herself met with an irrational obsession with death and all things darkness, today, she didn't want anything to do with it; not now, not ever again…

_How was it that she had become one of the lucky ones?_

"Tina?"

With the exception of Artie shouting for her attention across deafened ears, the room had fallen remarkably silent in comparison to the animated chaos that she had previously remembered…

There wasn't a single motion about the entirety of the room, not a single sound… In fact, the more that Tina looked about, the more she realized that her and Artie seemed to be just about the only two people left alive in here…

Across the length of the cafeteria, a handful of desperately injured students had begun to claw their way across the room in a bid for freedom that they knew they could never manage to achieve… Behind her, aligning the windows, a handful of stragglers were just now finding their way through the shattered panes, scurrying frantically towards the outside world, not caring, or even so much as noticing the jarring gashes that the shattered material had left against their skin…

In fact, with all of the living now gone, and their dead and injured counterparts left behind in their wake, William McKinley High School's cafeteria was beginning to resemble less of a classroom, and more of a mass grave with each passing second.

"They're all dead…" She muttered under her breath, her lips barely moving as she spoke to herself so that the words were emitted as nothing more than a low, barely audible growl…

"Tina, please!" Artie had now gone beyond the point of begging, desperation frantic behind his voice as he reached out to grab onto Tina's arm in order to tug her towards the remainder of her fleeing classmates by the windows… but it was no use.

Artie might as well have been clutching onto a three ton pile of cement… Tina wasn't budging, not an inch.

"They're all dead."

"Tina, please!" Artie's voice was growing steadily more desperate. Tina could physically hear the tears lacing underneath her boyfriend's voice, but still, she couldn't bring herself to follow him… she couldn't bring herself to move at all… even if it was for the sake of her own life. "They're going to come back here, let's go, please!"

"Did you see all of those cops out there?" Tina felt the muscles of Artie's hand tense firmly around her arm before she'd actually processed the distinct voice turning the corner inwards from beyond the depths of the hall…

But even if she hadn't, the vice grip that Artie currently held against her right wrist, so impossibly strong that it probably would have pained her had she actually been able to feel anything, would have told her exactly who that voice belonged to anyway…

"Yeah, I saw him…" Artie's previous prediction of the shooters' imminent return became spot on in a matter of mere moments, Jacob and Suzy's voices lingering and lacing together towards them, their bodies following mere seconds later.

She could feel Artie tugging at her in more exponentially frantic motions than even before, his intentions no longer revolving around their achieving escape, but now, to simply hide them, get them out of the open…

And in utilizing his super human strength, he had almost gotten her to budge… almost.

But Jacob had taken one step towards them… two steps, and all at once, Artie was just as frozen as Tina had found herself; a sitting duck, rendered motionless by fear and paralysis directly in the center of the world, for all to see…

They both knew that had Jacob and Suzy wanted to kill them right now, they could have done so without so much as blinking first…

And the thing that scared Tina the most was the idea that she wasn't sure whether or not she actually cared…

"Hey," Jacob spoke suddenly, the excitement evident behind his voice as he believed himself struck with a sense of brilliance. "We should shot at some of them."

"No, Jacob…" Suzy sighed in her negative confirmation, her head shaking slightly as she spoke with an impossibly low tone that, for the briefest of seconds forced Tina to wonder whether or not Suzy had actually been met with a sense of a conscious during her brief, mysterious journey throughout the hallways of William McKinley High School. "No, I'm done here."

Her words were final as she conveyed her message, so final in her tone that it had even caught Jacob off guard; the surprise evident in his eyes as him and Suzy strode briskly past Artie and Tine as if they hadn't even seen their two terrified classmates…

But they had to have seen them; there was no way that they couldn't of… After all, Suzy's shoulder had practically brushed up against her own; there was no way in hell that they hadn't noticed her standing there… no way at all.

Tina Cohen-Chang was officially confused.

"What do you mean you're done?" Jacob turned towards Suzy, facing her with the same icy malice behind his eyes that he had shown to all of those that he had killed right before he had shot them…

"I mean I'm done." She repeated, emphasizing her final words so that Jacob would understand exactly what she meant when she used the word _done_. "We're done, Jacob. We did everything, we got everyone… There's no one left, Jacob."

"What are you talking about?" Jacob was practically yelling now. "There's plenty of people left!" Tina could practically feel his eyes baring a hole straight through her as he spoke.

"Do you hear that, Jacob? Do you hear them?" Suzy motioned outwards with her arm, pointing towards the windows as she signaled towards the outside world; the growing sound of sirens blaring painfully inside of all of their ears. "Do you want to get killed by the cops, or do you want to have a say in how it happens? Think of our plan, Jacob… this isn't how it's supposed to be."

There was a moment of silence as Jacob paused, considering Suzy's words as his eyes softened slowly with the realization that she was correct in saying that much…

"You're right," Jacob nodded in his agreement, his voice more soft; more defeated than what Tina had heard it all day; and suddenly, she saw that there was actually an end in sight, that this could actually be ending, unlike what they had all previously believed…

They weren't going to be stuck here in this hell for the rest of eternity…

The floor shuddered slightly below Tina's feet as Jacob emphasized his agreement with Suzy by dropping down to his knees, his baggy cargo pants drenching in the blood that he himself had spilled as he ensured the shotgun between his hands to be loaded before positioning it securely beneath his chin, holding it stable between his knees as his fingers grazed upwards and against the trigger.

He waited chivalrously for Suzy to join him, but the girl was taking her time, hands trembling as she loaded her final rounds of ammunition into the 9mm handgun that Tina hadn't even known she'd had on her person until this moment…

Unlike Jacob, Suzy was moving in careful slow, coordinated movements, her eyes scanning across the length of the room one last time, lingering particularly long against the outside world just beyond the windows; the outside world that she would never again have the opportunity to see before she too, dropped to her knees besides Jacob.

"We'll do it on three, okay?" Jacob's voice trembled, Suzy not even able to verbally respond as she merely nodded her head, squeezing her eyes shut tightly as she pulled back against the hammer of her weapon and pressed it firmly against her right temple.

"One…"

Tina could see the tears lingering behind Suzy's eyes so that she couldn't help but wonder whether or not the girl would actually be able to carry through with this action, whether or not by the time Jacob reached three, Suzy would still find herself able to pull the trigger.

"Two…"

She felt almost a sense of sympathy towards the girl as she wondered what series of events had actually gotten her to this point in her life… Had she simply just been in the wrong place or the time? Or, by some sort of grandiose misfortune, had her and Jacob Ben-Israel just so happened to have met up with each other while both were having particularly bad days?

"Three."

The bang was silencing, but no way near as much so as the resultant quiet…

A cascade of blood erupted simultaneously from the heads of Jacob Ben-Israel and Suzy Pepper as, for a split second, they wobbled where they stood before tipping sideways and away from each other, limp and sprawled poetically outwards against the ground, guns scattering from their hands and across the floor.

For the briefest of seconds, Tina found herself trembling where she stood; her knees chattering against each other as her eyes remained firmly glued to the scene in front of her; wanting nothing more than to turn away, yet finding herself mysteriously unable to actually do so…

In retrospect, she should have known that it would only be a matter of time before the forces of motion swarming all around her carried her straight down to her very knees…

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><p>She wasn't sure exactly how long that it was that she was standing there for… It could have been minutes, hours… days for all she knew.<p>

The only thing that she knew for certain was that when she finally reentered into a fleeting world of consciousness for the second time in the past several minutes alone, she was no longer alone…

"Honey, are you okay? Are you injured?" Her eyes focused slowly against the image of a strong, male face; its unfamiliarity more and more prominent the clearer, it got. "Can you hear me?"

She made the motion to force her lips to move, made the motion to respond to the man's worried inquiries, but her throat was suddenly feeling as if it had been singed by pure fire, robbing her voice from it entirely.

"No, wait!" The presence of an outside tone attracted her attention instantly based on its familiarity; the only sense of such amidst such a deranged confusion. "Tina, wait… Tina!"

Through a flash that had appeared suddenly before her through the corner of her eyes, she could see Artie flailing frantically from within his hair, straggling against a man dressed similar to the one directly in front of her as he guided Artie's wheelchair, devoid of the boy's voluntary control towards the cafeteria's entrance and outside into the hallway.

"No, Artie, no, don't take him!" Her scream so abrupt, so astonishingly high in pitch that the man before her leapt slightly back in his surprise…

Tina sprang to her feet in an instant, barely aware of the fact that she had blood dripping down her front as she launched herself forwards towards Artie… There was a lot of things about the scene before her that she wasn't sure of, but if there was one thing for certain, she couldn't let this man, this stranger take him…

"No, wait," The man standing before her stopped her in her tracks, enveloping her into a tight bear hug where he restrained her easily against his significantly larger frame so that her knees collapsed out from underneath her in an instant, solely due to the sheer unexpectedness of his attack, sending her sprawling outwards and against the ground once more.

"Artie!" She cried in a deafeningly shrieking manner towards him as he was brought straight out of the door and around the corner; out of view in a manner of seconds so that Tina could immediately feel the tears stinging at the corners of her eyes, could feel her breathing growing painfully quicker, her heart increasing in its pace until she felt as if it would positively explode straight out of her chest.

"It's okay, sweetheart," The man tried to calm her down, smothering her in terms of endearment so that she couldn't help but cringe. "My guys will take good care of him. They will get him out of here safe."

Tina paused suddenly in her bid to escape, her captor's words striking her as odd as she turned to face him once more, eyes focusing, for the first time, on the official demeanor that she simply hadn't noticed about him on first glance.

Against the thick, bullet proof armor fastened securely to his chest, she could suddenly make out the blinding white lettering; the initials _S.W.A.T._ emblazoned almost painfully against the black fabric so that in an instant, she felt foolish towards the idea that she had missed something so strikingly obvious the first time…

Her eyes scanned across the remaining length of the room; in fact, now that she looked, she realized that he wasn't even the only officer inside of the room… No, there had to be at least a dozen of them; men all of similar statue and dress, scouring the remnants of their cafeteria as they analyzed the bodies that littered the ground and held onto the wounded for dear life.

And suddenly, she found her body finally allowing itself to relax inside of these unfamiliar arms; the mental exhaustion, the physical toll striking her full swing…

She was safe; she was finally safe.

"Are you hurt honey?" She could feel his eyes scanning up and down the length of her body, but she knew that it would be impossible for him to assess the fact that she wasn't actually injured; after all, she had been doused down the full length of her front in blood… how was he supposed to know that none of it was actually hers? "Have you been shot?"

She didn't respond to his questioning immediately; instead, she embraced this allusion of safety, allowing herself to get lost inside of it as she simply fell limp inside of his arms, relaxing the entirety of her body for the first time in what seemed like hours; growing instantly catatonic inside of this embrace.

"I need a paramedic over here!" She could feel the reverberations of the shouting that originated straight from his chest against her back… And she knew that she should have told him that none of that would actually be necessary, she knew that she should have told him to focus on those actually dying as opposed to those like her, those too weak to save their own souls, but she just couldn't…

And as if on a perfect cue, an assembly line of paramedics suddenly bombarded into the room, rushing forwards like a fast-paced parade in a rush of overwhelming colors and loud noises so that in an instant, the room had grown from near silence, to a chaos that rivaled that by which it was even met with when Jacob and Suzy were still enacting their dutifully planned rampage inside of it.

"Hon, can you hear me?" She felt suddenly overwhelmed by the multitude of people surrounding her, boxing her into the center of a cramped circle so that the sense of claustrophobia that accompanied the motions made it difficult to breathe. "Can you tell me your name?"

Tina's lips moved in a motion of distinct speech however, she could allow no sound to actually come out of her mouth.

"Tina." The man still holding her firmly from behind answered the emergency crew's accurately. "Her friend… her friend was yelling to her before. Her name is Tina."

Tina's eyes glanced quickly upwards towards the man; a silent response towards her appreciation of his attention to detail.

"I couldn't find any physical wounds, but I only looked quickly." He relayed Tina's information off towards the paramedics, frantically scribbling, taking in every minute detail to make up for the little they actually knew. "It has to be somewhere… She's… she's got blood all over her but I couldn't get her to talk to me… She's probably in shock."

Shock; well that was the understatement of the century, Tina couldn't help but think.

"Okay, triage her quickly!" The older of the set of paramedics shouted to his young partner before rushing off, headed towards the next body in an effort to assess the severity of their injuries. "And find an entry wound! See if you can get her to talk!"

Triage… Tina had Tivo'd enough television shows depicting acts of mass trauma to know what that meant… What, with so many kids injured and dying all around, and only a limited supply of emergency workers to respond to them, the paramedics would now be left with the difficult task of prioritizing their patients for transport; those that could wait to be taken to the hospital, those that couldn't… and those that they shouldn't even bother with.

"I'm gonna give her a yellow tag, Larry." The younger man shouted quickly back to his partner, simultaneously fastening a neon yellow tag to Tina's wrist before scribbling quickly, what little information that he actually knew about her against the designated slots.

Yellow… She had been classified a delayed priority victim; although with her lack of injuries, she knew that she shouldn't have been designated a priority at all… She was taking away from the help that somebody else needed; so why the hell couldn't she open her mouth and say something?

"I've got a green over here; GSW to the upper right shoulder." Through the corners of her eyes, Tina spotted two individuals; one man and one woman, busying themselves over Kurt as they sat him upright; his eyes open, yet dazed with pain as the female paramedic pressed a 4x4 bandage firmly against his still prominently bleeding shoulder.

Green… Kurt had been shot; he had actually sustained a physical, life threatening injury, yet still, he had been designated with a mere minor priority level… He would be one of the last living victims to leave this cafeteria alive to be taken to the hospital; and here she was, assigned to be taken before her, and she wasn't even injured.

"I can't find an entry wound!" The paramedic at her side spoke aloud to the officer still holding firmly onto her; his hands scouring intrusively over her body as he searched for an injury that simply wasn't there. "Are you sure she's been shot?"

"She's got blood all over her." The officer stated in a matter-of-fact motion.

There was a response by the paramedic, the man making an attempt to address Tina once more, but this time, she truly hadn't even heard him; his voice suddenly overridden by another shout from overhead.

"I've got a red over here!" The voice was devoid of any sense of a professional mannerism; frantic, and rightfully so… A red tag; a top priority victim… Whoever this man was currently standing over, was mortally wounded. "Wait, I know this kid; he's on the football team, he's a friend of my son's… Noah, Noah can you hear me?"

In a sudden rush of wind, somebody pushed a gurney directly past her and towards Puck as the boy continued to bleed out against the cafeteria floor, left continuously unresponsive from the penetrating wound that had blasted a hole directly through his sternum.

The tears rapidly started dripping downwards from Tina's eyes as she squeezed them shut firmly in response to the progression of the paramedic's initial assessments of the various victims… She knew what was coming next, she knew that it was inevitable; but that didn't mean that she was ready to hear it.

"Black," The voice was instinctively sympathetic; an echo of sadness that made it even harder for Tina to hear than it already had to be as she opened her eyes just in time to watch a young police officer remove his hat from his head out of sheer respect; fastening a pure black tag around Quinn Fabray's limp wrist before sliding a pure white sheet over her body, covering it in its entirety…

"Black," From just beyond Quinn's body, a second voice echoed so quickly following the first that the two meshed together making the second sound like a mere echo of the first… But Tina wasn't dumb enough to believe that to be the case; not when she could blatantly see the second officer directly in front of her as he hovered over Mercedes' body; the young girl's eyes wide in response to the latest accessory being added to the bracelets adorning her wrist; a black tag.

"Black," The paramedics had barely even bothered to so much as brush over Santana's form before harshly classifying her with a black tag…

"Black," Matt… He had been so close to freedom, so close to achieving freedom and getting the help that he needed… But Jacob and Suzy had lingered for five minutes too long, emergency crews were just five minutes too late… Five minutes that separated him from the hopeless survivors, to those that had simply just run out of luck.

"Two potential suspects are confirmed down." A single man spoke pointedly into the walkie-talkie attached to his vest; his gun drawn just in case said two potential suspects were merely feigning death as he silently appointed a team of five to gather information to overtake the two deceased teenagers.

"Two suspects; one male, one female, each approximately fifteen to seventeen years in age; both suspects are armed, there is one Remington .12 shotgun and one Glock 17 handgun currently visible on site." All six walked on the balls of their feet, moving slowly so that each step seemed to Tina, to take an hour.

"Each appears to have one self-inflicted gunshot wound to the head; assessing the suspects now." The leader of the pack took a final step towards Jacob's body, one leg on either side of the motionless boy as he kept his right hand clenched firmly around his gun, finger grazed against the trigger the entire time as he reached downwards with his free hand to check for a pulse in the boy's neck.

"Male suspect is confirmed deceased." He relayed Jacob Ben-Israel's status to the entirety of the outside world waiting tensely around him as he subconsciously loosened the grip around his weapon before stepping towards Suzy Pepper in a similar manner as he had done so with Jacob, pressing two fingers firmly against her prominent carotid artery.

He paused briefly as he waited to distinguish a familiar thump beneath his fingertips before his sharp blue eyes contorted into a distinct look of concentration, slowly softening away from their professional tone, expressing nothing but pure shock as he darted sharply upwards from his squatting position and shouted over all of the head surrounding him towards the groups of paramedics standing idly by the cafeteria doors.

"I have a pulse on the female suspect!" He shouted so loudly that his words echoed off of the very walls around him, entering every ear of every person still capable of conscious thought inside of the room so that a collective silence overcame even the most chaotic of scenes. "Get me a gurney in here, now!"

From inside of the very depths of her chest, Tina could feel her heart physically stop as a small group of paramedics rushed past her – gurney in tow – and towards Suzy Pepper.

She was alive… How was it that Suzy Pepper had managed to survive a bullet to the head when so many of her victims before her had been much less lucky with much lesser wounds?

She could physically feel it as first; her limps began to shake; the motion progressing rapidly so that before she knew it, it had travelled upwards through the remainder of the length of her body; from her toes, straight up through her very head…

The paramedics rushing towards Suzy didn't linger for so much as a heartbeat; instead, they lifted Suzy into the air straightaway, throwing her on top of the stretcher so that she was rushed from the room and towards the bay of awaiting ambulances, no doubt already filled to the brim with her very victims with her ammunition still attached heavily to her belt; adorning it to the extent of decorations on a Christmas tree and a pistol still holstered inside of the left pocket of her cargo pants.

Standing her ground firmly, a still-trembling Tina watched without so much as blinking as the gurney was shuffled directly past her; the resultant gust of wind brushing across her body in a manner that chilled her straight down to her very bones sparking the switch that she hadn't even known existed before this instant, so that without so much as a transition from her silence, she opened her mouth and began to scream; the noise emitted as so loud, so shrill, so extended that it held the capacity to awake even the black tagged victims layered all around her…

The emergency crews busying themselves with Tina's well being jumped back briefly in their surprise, cringing through the pain her continuous shouts were bringing to their eardrums as they attempted to calm her, attempted to silence her…

But for the life of her, Tina couldn't bring herself to stop; and in that moment, she was struck with the realization that there was a strong possibility that, for the rest of her life, she never would.


	15. Part II  Prologue

**Hello, everybody! Hope your holidays went well, I just got back to New York after spending Christmas with my insane family in Ireland so now that I'm home again I'm (not quite) ready to get my ass back to work :)**

**Anyways, this is the Prologue to Part II of this story which is basically just the immediate aftermath. I'm not sure yet how many parts there will be, right now I'm thinking three or four, but once I get started I usually can't stop, so knowing me it will probably be about ten in reality haha.**

**Hope you enjoy, I'll try to get the next one up sooner.**

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><p><strong>Prologue – Part II<strong>

Friday, June 4th, 2010

(Afternoon)

It's difficult to properly assess the concept of what chaos truly is until you manage to catch a glimpse of it for yourself.

You can read all of the dictionary definitions, scrutinize over all of the eyewitness accounts, but until you yourself have become trapped inside of your own frantic mind, with the very portrait of destruction dancing directly before your eyes, it is impossible to know what the true meaning of chaos actually is.

Chaos was a school full of children; its occupants running frantically in every which direction except towards the one that lead back inside towards a building they once believed to be safe.

Chaos was students, teachers, faculty… people who didn't even know each other embracing, sobbing into one another's shoulders as they were circled by SWAT teams and guided into safety.

Chaos was the puddles of blood diluting inside of the residual rain water scattered about the campus, the oceans of parents screaming the names of their missing children, their necks stretched to the absolute threshold in an effort to scan across the sea of heads.

Chaos was the fact that no matter how many ambulance, no matter how police cars actually arrived, there never seemed to be enough…

Chaos was the absolute portrait of safety being shattered, being taken away from every which direction that you turned.

To those on the outside, they couldn't help but wonder whether or not the children of William McKinley High School had gone to class earlier that morning knowing that dead was dead; knowing that once you died, you would never get the opportunity to return, you would never see the things that you were bound to miss, the outcome of what could have been the rest of your life…

You didn't get an opportunity to take it all back. You didn't get to have a second chance.

They were wondering whether or not these children had gone to class earlier that morning thinking that death was something that they could control; a group of naïve teenagers who, just this morning, believed death to be the ultimate answer before they were harshly reminded that in reality, it was really just the biggest question of them all.

But meanwhile, on the inside, the picture had become a much different story than that on the out…

The question that was currently being asked, the question on the minds of all of those left to pick up the pieces, those left to put the puzzle back together once more was not why, but how…

How was it that these two impossibly rogue students could have carried along with their normal, everyday lives, unnoticed by any, as directly behind closed doors, they had been plotting a methodical plan, months in the making; a plan who's effectiveness had only become too obvious; the evidence in the body count, climbing rapidly with each passing second.

Twenty two; there had been twenty two kids thus far confirmed injured, three of them currently being classified in such grave condition, that they weren't even expected to survive the next couple of hours, let alone the night.

But still, they had been the lucky ones.

Fourteen; fourteen people had lost their lives inside of William McKinley High School this morning – eleven students, two teachers, and but one of the two suspects…

Jacob Ben-Israel; the deadliest of the two shooters based entirely on purely eyewitness accounts and ballistic evidence…

He had been responsible for the majority of those that lay dead here today, including himself, sprawled against the cafeteria floor with his brain stem blown clear out of the back of his head, and the barrel of a Remington .12 Shotgun still lodged underneath what was left of his chin.

And within a pristine plastic bag of evidence, and a scrutinizing glare, they had all evaluated Jacob Ben-Israel's final rite to the world, his last words upon contributing to the majority of the slayings that had left thirteen of his fellow peers dead.

_Re-evaluate your heroes. This was never my fault._

Jacob Ben-Israel had known from the very second that he had stepped inside of his high school earlier that morning that his peers, his classmates, the individuals who, in his own twisted mind had caused this massacre, would be recognized as the martyrs of this tragedy and him, the villain…

He wanted to make sure that they knew that while they had managed to ruin his entire life in sixteen short years, he had managed to ruin theirs in sixteen short minutes…

So in the end, who was the one that was really laughing now?

It was hours later that the entirety of the country before them slowly began to understand the extent of the horrors that presided that day inside of a small town in northwestern Ohio; their eyes glued to their televisions blaring the midday news as they struggled to comprehend the magnitude of the tragedy.

It was hours later that the sun beat down brightly at its peak in the sky, obscuring the continuously flashing emergency lights of the seemingly thousands of vehicles with its blinding glare.

It was hours later that the last of the living had been escorted from inside of the school; a small group of four cramped in darkness inside of the janitors closet, too terrified to check whether or not it was safe to move.

It was hours later that the final body had been removed from inside of the cafeteria, that the efforts to return this high school back into what it was before the haunts of fourteen ghosts had been left to permanently roam the halls began.

And directly outside of the empty shell that had once been a high school, parents searched tearfully for their children, desperation prominent inside of their eyes, longing for information confirming that their child was not one of the fourteen that they had heard about on the news.

Students firmly embraced one another, tears sweltering across their eyes in the recognition that some old friends were safe while still, others were not.

Crowds that were equipped with candles and personalized posters, flowers and stuffed animals stood shoulder to shoulder across the packed football field; gathered by the thousand in order to pay their respects while meanwhile, inside of the senior parking lot, five cars that would never be driven by their owners ever again were turned into makeshift memorials.

It was within a matter of minutes that an entire town came together, reeling in their pain, burning with their questions as they remembered the dead, they prayed for the dying, and they struggled to comprehend just how anything could ever possibly be construed as normal ever again.


	16. Jacob & Suzy  Part II

**Hello again, everyone! First and foremost as always, thanks for your patience. I have been very, very lazy this break but getting ready to go back to school means much more room for procrastination (i.e. writing) so hopefully things will speed up.**

**I wanted to give a specific shout out to a couple of people who have been consistently awesome: x0xalexis8, ddbddb123, Vienna98, iamnumbernine, this_guy_doesnt_have_a_clue, SparkleInTheSun, asesina, the finchelshipper, cribellate, and finally, danceintherain. Can't give you enough thanks for the feedback, you guys a particularly awesome.  
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**Also, whether the next couple of chapters are happy or not is completely dependent on my mood which is completely dependent on how the Giants do in the playoffs this weekend. So for spoilers, just watch the game :)**

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><p><strong>Chapter 14<strong>

**Quiet In My Town**

(Jacob and Suzy – Part II)

In the most lament terms possible, Jacob Ben-Israel had been born the product of an unplanned one night stand.

He had never known his grandparents; they had kicked his mother, Rebecca, out of their home long before she so much as became pregnant with him, and at a mere seventeen years of age, she had found herself on her own; gone without so much as a second thought otherwise, never looking back once as she moved from the esteemed town of Lima, to the less prestigious ghetto of Lima Heights to live with her boyfriend Abe.

The night of Jacob's conception had begun typically enough; Abe's best friend at the time had been a boy by the name of Isaac Israel; a kid who had had two rich parents who cared more about their jobs than they actually did their son, leaving him, for weeks at a time, home alone with a couple hundred dollars cash to spend at his leisure.

The poor boy didn't have a prayer's chance of ever becoming anything other than a hopeless drug addict.

To this day, Rebecca Ben didn't remember much about the exact night in question; the only thing that she truly did know for certain was that the next morning, after she had woken up naked inside of Isaac's bed she hadn't thought twice about it until weeks later, after daily bouts of nausea began crippling her to the point that she could barely so much as lift herself out of bed in the mornings.

Her boyfriend had gone with her to the doctor in an effort to evaluate the cause of this sudden, mysterious illness, and when the older woman had come in to meet them with a clipboard in her hand and a serious look written upon her face, Rebecca knew in an instant, that she couldn't be bringing her good news…

When she told Rebecca that she was seven weeks pregnant, Abe had told her flat out, right in the middle of the doctor's office that he didn't want anything to do with her, or her bastard child… The problem was that when she had turned to Isaac, his story was more or less the same.

Neither of her child's potential fathers wanted anything to do with this baby currently growing inside of her very body, and so she'd suddenly found herself completely, and utterly on her own, struggling to make ends meet through the majority of her pregnancy.

She was six months along when she, like so many others before her had managed to find her solace in religion; salvation coming in the form of a Christian charity that had been paying for her ultrasounds since day one finally roping her into attending one of their services so that she was instantly hooked from the first day onward…

Had she actually spoken to her parents once in the year since they had kicked her out, she was certain that they would be disappointed with her conversion into Evangelism… just as they were with everything else that she did.

Her father, the local Rabbi, and her mother, the stereotypical Rabbi's wife had named her Rebecca after the prominent Jewish matriarch; the wife of Abraham, the mother of Isaac…

She had been named after one of the original founders of her religion as a whole, but not once in the entirety of her life had she ever felt anywhere even close to holy…

She could only hope that luck would see things differently for her son.

The second that she'd discovered her child to be a boy, she had decided to call him Jacob.

A prominent prophet from the Book of Genesis, Jacob had been the son of the prophet Isaac and his wife, Rebekah, renamed Israel later in life by an angel straight from the heavens above... Under her belief system, it seemed, her son had picked out the name for himself straight from the very beginning.

In the Bible, Jacob had been a twin; he'd had a brother by the name Esau and was born destined by God to always be a server as opposed to a leader; the weaker of the two brothers…

Esau had grown up to be a hunter, a warrior by nature while Jacob existed as a mere simpleton; one who enjoyed his time spent to himself, lost inside of his own thoughts…

But one day, without anybody so much as seeing it coming, Jacob had gotten the better of everybody… He'd been a cunning man, he'd just had to wait for his opportunity, and when it came, he acted upon it.

Jacob's father, Isaac, on his death bed had wished to grant his birthright to Esau, the younger of the twins as opposed to Jacob… But Jacob had deceived his father, deceived his brother… he'd easily tricked Isaac into passing his birthright onto him instead of his brother.

After living his entire life at the bottom of the pyramid, Jacob had gotten the better of everybody; and for the rest of his life, he thrived off of it, living peacefully with his wife Rachel and their thirteen children until his death, which came peacefully at the age of one hundred eighty.

Jacob Ben-Israel had been a perfectly healthy baby boy at 10:46 a.m. early on the morning of Friday, January 20th, 1995; and the second that Rebecca had seen her child for the first time, with his deep brown eyes and enormous tufts of curly red hair, she knew Isaac to be his father; although deep down in her heart of hearts, she had known that all along…

Rebecca had decided to give the boy both of their last names; her maiden name, Ben, attached to Isaac's Israel in the hopes that the second that Isaac actually laid eyes upon his son, he would come around, accept the child that was rightfully his, fall in love with the boy just as she had done nine months ago to the day….

But inside of her heart, she had known from the beginning that that would not be the case, and she had been correct… Jacob and Rebecca had grown up together, just the two of them; Jacob never receiving that father figure in his ear to tell him exactly how to grow up to become the bigger, the better man…

Jacob had never had a father to warn him of all of the terrible things that man could grow up to become, leaving him destined from the beginning to become nothing more than the very worst of himself.

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><p>Suzy Marie Pepper had been raised a southern bell trapped inside of a Mid-Westerner's body.<p>

Both of her parents had been born into the deep, rural Texas lifestyle, and despite their physical location, their hearts had remained with their home for their entire lives, leaving them both relentlessly bitter towards the idea that Henry Pepper's promotions through the armed forced had left them with no choice than to move out of their beloved South and into the cold, desolate, overpopulated territory up North.

Her mother Jeannine had spent the entirety of her life in The Woodlands. The first time that she had ever so much as stepped foot outside of her home county, she had been well into her twenties and she had hated every second it…

After all, her identity, her beauty, her life had been with her home…

In her hometown, Jeannine Beauchard had been considered an uncanny beauty, a stunning miracle of a woman who's mere appearance turned heads with every step forwards that she took… And an avid competitor across prized beauty pageants throughout the state, Jeannine had found herself receiving the honor of being awarded with the coveted title of Ms. Texas so that in her bid towards the largest beauty competition in the country, she had quickly become the favorite to win Ms. USA…

Her victory hadn't been a question… it had been an inevitability.

But ultimately, her dream had been brought to end before it had even begun; the day before the big competition, she had snapped her ankle in two practicing her talent so that the following day, as she lay in surgery having eight screws and two plates inserted to hold the bones back together, her runner up was called in to take the title that she knew she had always deserved…

Meanwhile, in a complete opposite fashion, her father had been a hard man his entire life… He had been born to become a Marine, he always told her, and him and his mother used to constantly joke that their stark differences was what always made their love for each other so strong…

It was a mere two days following him and his wife's learning that Jeannine was pregnant that he had been deployed to Kuwait in the midst of a raging Gulf War… A month later, his entire platoon had been decimated after his Apache had been bombed mere moments following its takeoff… He had been the only survivor of the attack – albeit barely – and after he returned to the United States in order to enter a military run rehabilitation facility with a missing right leg and a severe case of post traumatic stress, nobody, including himself, could have ever possibly anticipated what the future would have in store for him and his family.

The night terrors had begun immediately following Henry's return home, five months following the accident that had nearly killed him, and despite the couple's best efforts to do what they could on their own, it was only a matter of time before they began to get violent…

And exactly as expected, the days of simply ignoring an increasing problem eventually did catch up with them in a reality check that Jeannine was met with harshly during the early morning hours of one not so particularly special day, after she had woken up with her husband on top of her, screaming in his unconscious terror with his hands around her throat, squeezing as hard as he possibly could…

It didn't matter that he was fast asleep; she just couldn't seem to get him off of her, no matter how hard she tried.

By the time Henry Pepper had finally awoken, it was only to find his unconscious wife limp between his muscular arms, and for several long, gut-wrenching minutes, he had honestly thought that he'd actually killed her…

She'd been in respiratory arrest for fifteen minutes; or at least, that's what Henry had been told by his lawyer as he sat on an isolate bench in his solitary jail cell… And at eight months pregnant, doctors had informed Jeannine that they had managed to find a fetal heartbeat on her child, however, it would be impossible to tell whether or not the baby would suffer any long term damage until after she was born; likely not until after she truly began developing…

The years would eventually prove that their daughter had gotten lucky despite such a vicious attack; however, Jeannine hadn't experienced the good fortune that had befallen her child…

The extended respiratory arrest had left her permanently brain damaged; an injury that had manifested itself in a physical deformity to which Jeannine Pepper, ex-beauty queen, would have preferred death… The left side of her face would remain paralyzed for the rest of her life; a malformation that in Jeannine's opinion, left her flawless features unbearably hideous, unworthy of anybody's stare, including her own…

She refused to subject her hideousness onto the world, and in her bid for constant solitude, she'd spent the final month of her pregnancy locked away inside of her home with her doors locked, shades drawn, and phone shut firmly off…

She was mortified by her disfigurement, mortified towards the idea that she had been left to fend for herself as her husband spent the next year locked away inside of a clinic that specialized in soldiers struggling to cope through the horrors that they had seen at war, mortified at what people might say, what they might do if they found out…

When Susanna Marie Pepper had been born on May 24, 1992 fully to term yet severely underweight and unable to breathe on her own, Jeannine hadn't told a soul… Instead, she'd spent the night following her daughter's birth much like she had the month leading up to it; by herself, wide awake yet unmoving beneath the faint glow of her hospital room as she waited on the news regarding whether or not her child had survived the night…

And when the nurse had come in the next morning to inform Jeannine that her daughter was born a fighter and inquired as to what the girl's name would be; Jeannine hadn't even hesitated before deciding to call her Susanna after the woman who, ten years ago to the day, stole a crown that Jeannine couldn't even dream about calling her own anymore in the hopes that her daughter would find more success, more happiness in achieving her dreams than the girl's mother had ever had.


	17. Brittney Pierce Part II

**Wow, it's been a while! Sorry about that, I took a bit of a break on life as a whole and spent a bit of time doing some spontaneous traveling so I'm sorry for abandoning without notice but I'm back!**

**Finn's chapter is up next!  
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* * *

><p><strong>Chapter 15<strong>

**Until We Fall**

(Brittney Pierce – Part II)

Her hair was soaking wet.

Her hair was soaking wet courtesy of the steady drip of whatever substance it was that she was laying beneath, falling at a uniform pace like a harassing metronome hell bent on driving her absolutely insane.

But still, she couldn't seem to bring herself to move, to lift her head up from within her crossed arms to look; not once.

The gunshots had stopped several minutes ago, but in its wake, it had left behind something much worse; something that Brittney was even more terrified than she had been the barrel of a gun… She could hear the screams, the pounding of scrambling footsteps as her fortunate classmates darted across the cafeteria in a bid to capitalize on Jacob and Suzy's suddenly departure…

But Brittney had found herself blinded by her terror, deafened by a portrait of chaos that she couldn't bring herself to face; so she didn't, occupying her eyes on an image that didn't delve beyond the inside of her own eyelids.

It has been minutes that felt like hours since Santana had been shot dead, but still, Brittney couldn't bring herself to face the world quite yet although she wasn't so sure exactly what it was that she was afraid to see considering she had already seen the absolute portrait of her greatest nightmare coming true before her very eyes.

She could only guess that it was just easier for her to believe that she had simply made the entire thing up when she didn't have to actually face it.

But by the graces of her terrified classmates, this blissful naivety was getting more and more difficult to succumb to as the noise gradually swelled to near deafening levels within her eardrums.

She forced her eyes to open slowly; her veil of security no longer effective now that she had allowed such external distraction to infiltrate her fragile mind… However, when the first thing that Brittney's eyes focused on upon falling open once more was Santana's motionless body, blood pooling beneath her open skull, Brittney couldn't help but think that maybe, just maybe, she had been better off where she was.

_Maybe I'll be better off wherever Santana is._

Subconsciously, she wiped her shaking hand across the top of her head, her fingers weaving through her hair so that the moisture that had been torturously collecting through the keratin fibers collected against her palm… Upon her observation, the thin white, liquid sheath layering her palm combined with the overwhelming smell of dairy told her that she had found recluse hiding beneath an overturned milk carton this entire time.

Her body felt numb, weak, impossibly heavy so that she knew in an instant that she wouldn't be able to move even if she tried… It was a thought confirmed only when her flaccid muscles instinctually moved to pull herself out from beneath the table, achieving mere inches of wiggle-room before her body was pitched forward; falling like an overturned tree towards the ground below.

She fell directly on top of Santana's body in a motion that she could only rationalize through her subconscious desire never to leave the young Latina's side…

Her body was cold to the touch, motionless beneath Brittney's head as the blonde buried her face deep into the girl's shoulder and sobbed desperately, allowing for her tears to be soaked by the spongy cotton of Santana's Cheerio's uniform.

She could only relish in her past now; the sheer amount of times that the two had found themselves in this very position – curled up securely within each other's bodies – albeit under distinctly different circumstances…

Brittney took advantage of her time she had while she had it, knowing for certain that would no longer last forever - the distinct lack of a heartbeat beneath Brittney's ear would make absolutely certain of that – but still, when a set of hands wrapped themselves around Brittney's shoulders and began to tug her away from Santana's body, she couldn't help but think that she hadn't been given enough time to mourn, enough time to grieve.

She wasn't ready to say goodbye; not now, not ever.

"No!" She shrieked, her voice emitting painfully through even her own ears as she struggled in earnest against this mysterious figure, trying desperately to save her, unable to know that in actuality, he was only making things worse.

She thrashed her body instinctually away from his grasp, her muscular shoulders jerking every which way as she dug her fingernails deep into Santana's skin, clawing at her in an effort to physically latch their bodies together so that she would never have to let her go.

And sure, Brittney S. Pierce was a strong girl, but whoever was holding onto her, well he was stronger… He got her up and to her feet with little to no extra effort involved.

"Come on Brittney, it will be okay, come on." Her ministrations paused only upon her identification of the familiarity behind the voice whispering gently inside of her ear. Her guard lowered instinctively as she performed an about face in an effort to identify her captor; flipping her body so that all at once, she found herself chest-to-chest with Mike Chang.

And suddenly, she found herself struck with the remembrance that she was not the only person that had lost a best friend today.

His eyes looked dead, impossibly saddened and yet somehow – Brittney couldn't understand how – still rigorously determined to fight, to save a life that no longer had anything left to live for as he gripped her upper arms firmly and steered her body towards the back wall of windows that the plethora of remaining students were currently clawing to climb through.

"We won't do them any good sitting here waiting to get ourselves killed." Brittney couldn't help but notice that it sounded much more as if he was trying to convince himself rather than her, but she tried to allow his words to motivate her as much as possible as her feet slowly began to shuffle towards the direction that Mike was guiding her…

He had a point - as much as she didn't want to believe it.

The approached the rabid crowds surrounding the windows cautiously watching with horrified shock as students pushed, clawed, bit, kicked, did absolutely anything that they could to ensure that they would be the next ones to escape…

But Brittney simply waited her turn in patience, her body screaming at her to rush forth, but her mind telling her to stay put, to not leave Santana, to not leave anybody behind…

She watched as one of her fellow Cheerio's, with clearly opposite intentions as herself, dove headfirst over a group of her fellow peers, performing an impressive pirouette in mid air that left her body expelling from the window before her in a twisted ball; her exposed skin slicing like ribbons against the jagged edges of the shattered window.

Blood dripped from the razor-sharp glass in rivers, catching a glare against the sunlight that made it seem as if it were positively glowing.

"Come on!" Mike shuffled his friend carefully forward, shielding her protectively as he pushed his way through the treacherous crowds in an effort to guide Brittney towards the broken pane, allowing her to use his cupped hands as a makeshift stepstool to hoist herself up and onto the windowsill.

She moved with a tedious caution; eyeing the sharp edges of the broken glass nervously as she guided her legs forward first, using the careful precision that more than ten years of dancing had graced her with to guide her motions.

"Hurry up!" From somewhere behind her, she heard the inpatient shouts of a young kid that Brittney didn't recognize as he ran forward, clearly frustrated by the slowness of her concerted motions as he nudged her harshly in an effort to stop her from blocking one of the only handful of exits currently acting as a saving grace for all of the kids that had been lucky enough to have escaped a bullet.

She jerked forwards with the momentum enacted upon her by the boy's rough shove, her hand shooting outwards instinctively in an effort to support herself, leaving her hissing with pain as one of the serrated glass edges embedded itself straight into her palm.

With a hiss of pain, her body reacted naturally, her hand withdrawing abruptly from the site as she hugged it close into her chest, leaving her balance thrown off in its entirety so that she stumbled forwards and straight out of the window, gravity plunging the three or four feet onto the hard pavement below.

She landed on her back with a thud that knocked the wind straight out of her chest, allowing her eyes to close momentarily as her mind scrambled to sort through the plethora of stimuli currently racing through it, centered painfully on the dull throb radiating outward from the gash in the center of her palm.

"What the fuck is your problem, man!" From her position against the pavement, she could merely hear Mike's distinct voice, presumably directed towards the boy that had just pushed her out of a window… "We're all trying to get out of here, wait your fucking turn!"

"Mike…" Brittney muttered; muting her feeble attempt at yelling. "No…" She tried to stop him, tried to get him to calm down, but her voice barely rose above a whisper so that it was only a matter of time before the familiar echo of a clenched fist hitting the bony face of a jaw line confirmed what she'd already known; he hadn't heard her, he hadn't acknowledged her plea for him to identify with the one thing that this entire school truly needed right now – a sense of unity.

She opened her eyes slowly; exposing herself to the sunlight so that the accompanying sense of relief hit her like a school bus; her senses overloading as they struggled to take in all of the sights, all of the sounds, all of the smells of an outside world that she wasn't certain she would ever have the opportunity to see again.

At first, everything was blurry, and it took her a couple of seconds to realize that this was simply because of the angle by which the sun had been striking the smooth sheath of tears layered across her eyes… But slowly, her breathing began to slow, her heart quieted against her ribs and her eyes adjusted upwards, reminding her painfully of just how quickly even the bluest of skies outside could turn to grey.

"Brittney! Brittney, are you okay?" She turned her head slowly, eyes narrowing upwards where they focused upon Mike's frame just as he was bounding out from beyond the broken window pane himself, rushing towards her.

He grabbed at her shoulders in an effort to guide her to her feet – pulling her in a manner that left her unable to help but to notice the fresh bruising forming across the knuckles of his right hand.

"Yeah," She insisted, pushing herself out of his grip, pausing only briefly to wipe away at some of the dirt littering her Cheerio's uniform. "Yeah, I'm fine… it's just a little cut on my hand, that's all."

Mike eyed her only briefly… If anything, the gash across her palm could be described as anything but _little_, but they couldn't linger on that topic of debate, not right now… It was a fact that she had been banking on.

"Okay, come on!" He grabbed her by the wrist of her uninjured hand, pulling so strongly that Brittney could feel an uncomfortable tug stretching out the joint of her shoulder, forcing her to follow Mike as he broke out into a run towards the entrance of the semi-enclosed courtyard that they had found themselves inside of upon throwing their bodies out of the cafeteria windows…

Her feet were forced to move in double time just to keep up with Mike's longer legs, and even though the endurance granted to her by her years of dancing provided her with muscular support, she couldn't help but to grow tired as she sprinted towards the entranceway separating the courtyard from the true outside directly at the opposite end of the school…

A poor architectural design, now that she thought about it.

The closer that she got to freedom however, the less she actually found herself noticing the distant throbbing of her leg muscles… Behind her, a brief array of gunshots exploded, forcing her to stumble slightly, tears stinging harshly at her eyes as she began to hyperventilate in her fear, but still… she never stopped running.

Mike had a white-knuckled grip against her arm, refusing to slow down or let go, so that Brittney was certain that by the time this journey was over, she would have dislocated her shoulder, but she couldn't focus too much on the pain… there was so much else, there was too much else…

Her lungs heaved, screaming in pain as her panic combined with the physical exertion of her abrupt sprint left her body unable to compensate against the shear amount of oxygen that her actions required… Her hand was throbbing, a clear cut trail of blood dripping behind her, her legs were burning… everything hurt.

She wasn't going to make it; she wasn't going to survive this, she knew it… She was mere inches from safety, yet seconds from collapsing in her exhaustion… She could practically feel freedom, practically taste it… but she was going to lose it, ruin everything on a pure technicality.

She was five steps away, four steps, three steps, two…

"Don't move, don't move, don't move!" The screaming orders were harsh, gruff and painful in volume as she felt a strong arm wrap around her upper chest, pinning her arms down to her side and rendering her completely immobile as she was thrown against the brick wall that she knew outlined the gym's exterior. "Keep your hands where I can see them! Keep them above your head; hold them where I can see them!"

Through her peripherals, she managed to catch a glimpse of her captor; the flash of a rifle, similar to that which she'd seen Suzy holding mere moments ago, silhouetted against the brick…

"No, please don't kill me!" Her eyes widened with fear, swimming with tears as she collapsed to her knees, curling herself into as tight a ball as humanly possible. "Please don't shoot me, please!" Her breathing expelled from her lungs in sharp, frantic bursts that made it feel as if her heart were going to explode from her chest… She thought that she was going to be saved; she thought that she was going to be rescued…

"Keep your hands up! Leave them up!" Her arms trembled as she raised them as high as she possibly could from her position on the ground, her injured hand throbbing painfully as she felt the dripping blood succumb to gravity, dripping steadily down the length of her raised arm…

"The boy is clear!" From beside her, she heard a familiar groan; Mike muttering in protest as he was lifted to his feet and pushed forwards… Brittney's heart swelled with fear; Mike was gone, Mike had been taken and now, she was never going to see him again…

"No, Mike!" Brittney lunged towards her friend, but before she'd had the opportunity to reach him, she was grabbed once more pressed even firmer into the wall.

"It's okay, it's okay… you can go with him soon," He told her, his voice much softer, much more gentle than it had been when he'd pinned her down mere moments ago. "This is just protocol; we have to check everybody that comes out of the school."

She swiveled in an about face, confused by his statement, realization only dawning upon her when she saw the S.W.A.T. logo emblazoned across the bullet-proof shield clutched between the hand that he wasn't currently using to pat her down for weaponry, trying to ensure that she wasn't a rogue shooter attempting to sneak out of the school amidst the rest.

"The girl's clear too!" He shouted into the clearing, giving Brittney a slight push over towards his partner just across the way, currently beckoning towards her with a frantic wave of his hand, indicating that she should move, and she should move quickly…

With but one final turn around the back of her shoulder, Brittney moved slowly at first before her legs gradually began to pick up their pace until she was bursting in a sprint, her legs feeling like gelatin from physical exertion combined with the adrenaline pouring into her system.

She ran to the officer, his arms outstretched to intercept the girl as she approached him, grabbing her quickly before she was once against thrown against a brick wall with an overwhelming force that left her wondering just how much more manhandling she could deal with…

"Alright honey, this is what I want you to do." His harsh, guided motions didn't reciprocate alongside his soothing voice. "I want you to keep your body pressed up as close against the wall as you can, follow it to the other side and there will be another officer waiting for you as soon as you get there."

Brittney nods frantically, subconsciously pressing her back as deep into the brick as she possibly could until she could feel the stone slicing cuts deep along the length of the small of her back, marking her movements.

Mere paces ahead of herself, she quickly located Mike as well as a handful of others that she recognized from being in the cafeteria with her… They were all moving at a mere snail's pace and she couldn't help but to be grateful for that; she was certain that she didn't have the means by which to move any faster, even if she had to.

A flash of gunfire sends her to the ground faster that the SWAT members surrounding her could even give her the instruction to do so…

Her stomach presses into the ground so hard that she can feel the sharp grass prickling against her stomach. She finds herself swallowing steeply in the agony that each residual gunshot brings her as officers swoop down seemingly from the air, guns poised and ready to shoot should they be provoked to do so. Tears leak from her eyes as she throws her arms up and over her head, trying to give herself as much protection as was possible in the openness of the quad, her fingers clutching at her hair until she was positively ripping out the stands with a sharp pain that she barely even noticed.

The instant that the loud popping sounds cease, the officers find themselves no longer willing to waste anymore time moving slowly… Brittney feels a gloved hand grabbing at her shoulder, clutching her by the sleeve of her Cheerio's uniform as he pulls her up with enough force to support the entirety of her body weight in his one limb.

"Move!" He orders her sharply, keeping his instructions swift and to the point as he points towards the direction of students already running in a cluster in front of her, "Run!"

She doesn't wait to follow the order and instead bolts, tears blocking her vision as the wind whips frantically across her face and her breathing pushes upwards and from her lungs in a series of harsh grunts that physically pain her chest.

She follows the massive crowd of her fleeing classmates, the blood pumping heavily inside of her ears, her muscles screaming at her as she inhales heavily yet still can't seem to suck in any productive form of oxygen… And then, just like that, she finds herself turning a corner, and it's all over…

"Here, in here, in here…" She approaches yet another set of strategically aligned officers as they shuffle her immediately into a school bus that is blocking her vision of her surroundings although she knows for a fact that she has successfully managed to reach the school's front entrance…

Her feet carry themselves up the brief stair path that leads into the bus, her eyes scanning about the rows of seats, her natural fight-or-flight response still charged enough to allow her to register her surroundings with a pinpoint accuracy… She spots Mike within seconds, and doesn't hesitate before she rushes to his side and sits herself beside him…

He doesn't say a word, and she doesn't either; instead, he wraps his arm across her upper back and pulls her into his shoulder where she finds herself instinctively resisting the motion only briefly before she feels her body relaxing in its depleting adrenaline source so that her muscles begin to relax and her mind to process the events had just emanated around her long enough to allow her to bury her face into Mike's muscular arm, and release herself in the form of racking sobs that have her body trembling, her eyes burning with pain, and the bus silencing in her guttural, choked noises.

The bus is no more than half full before it pulls away from the school within a minute of Brittney loading herself onto it. She can hear the thumping of a hand against the back window even over the sounds of her own cries; an officer producing the natural indicating motion to announce to the bus driver that it was safe for him to move, and although she knows this motion is one that indicates her ultimate safety, she can't help but to flinch with each dull thud, her voice marking it with a particularly retched sob as she perceives the noise to resemble the tone of firing bullets, although she knows there is barely a similarity between them at all.

James Taylor Middle School was directly down the road, situated at the opposite end of the street… It was a fifteen minute walk at most, but with the sidewalks sanctioned off as a makeshift emergency room, and the roads quarantined strictly to emergence vehicles only, the line of buses transporting students lucky enough to have escaped to their safe haven had to go the long way, performing an impressive circle around the radius of destruction.

Through her tear-filled eyes, she forced herself to stare beyond the natural barricade produced by Mike's body and out the window… She couldn't help but feel as if she were taking a trip through the set of a war movie rather than driving along an actual street…

EMT's aligned the sidewalks, bloody gauze pads and medical tape splayed like the confetti that she'd always seen littering Time's Square on New Year's Eve on her television…

There were students bleeding, screaming for a friend that they had lost track of in the chaos, sobbing for medical attention, sprinting for safety in every which direction without a glance back…

The bus entry leading up to the middle school that they were to be picked up at by their parents had been blocked off a mile in either direction, barricaded by police in an effort to ease the amounts of traffic of arriving students, but in the distance, Brittney could see the impossible traffic jam leading into the parent's entrance at the opposite end of the school, she could hear the screams of panicked parents trying desperately to push and shove their way to the front of the line to find information on their children, the wails of car horns, the screaming pleas that they made with police officers to let them through the barricades…

They're shuffled in an even assembly line into the school's back entrance; thousands of kids trying to squeeze themselves through two meager double doors into a gymnasium that was designed to hold a couple hundred rather than a couple thousand…

She could feel the floors creak beneath her feet as she pressed forwards, clutching onto Mike's arm the entirety of the time as she struggled to breathe against the overwhelming feeling of suffocation that came with being packed like a sardine into a gymnasium that was over capacity and beyond.

She finds herself immediately surrounded by people still embracing the idea that they had made it as if that made them think that they were one of the lucky ones or something… In reality, that idea only made Brittney feel the exact opposite way.

A female police officer with a megaphone attached to an amplifier was standing atop a simply table littered with a series of papers that appeared to be attendance sheets as her coworkers flipped through them with an impossible quickness in search of the names parents were screaming at them, trying to confirm whether or not they had been accounted for.

"If your child has been claimed and checked off, please exit the gymnasium as quickly as possible!" The woman was screaming, but the sobs of concerned parents searching desperately for their child next to the wails of traumatized teens as they embraced family members and friends in stranglehold hugs made it impossible to hear her unless you were standing directly next to her. "If you are still looking to locate your child please direct yourself to one of the tables of officers or the lists of the accounted for written on the wall opposite the bleachers!"

Brittney turned curiously towards said wall, forgetting her initial goal of finding her own mother and father where lined up against the drywall were what seemed like hundreds of sheets of computer paper, taped with no organization like a makeshift memorial and littered with the frantic scribbling of nearly illegible handwriting…

A handful of volunteer workers and police officers were making rounds back and forth along the wall, constantly updating the list with new names so that parents who were standing guard in their inability to find their child's name the first time pounced with tears in their eyes, hoping to get luckier in their second, third, fourth attempts…

Parents pushed past each other, throwing elbows, pulling hair and climbing over each other to get to the lists as their wide eyes scanned the names in search for the most familiar one, looking to confirm their teen's fate at the hands of what had only moments ago been a blank white page…

The papers were organized into several specific sections, Brittney quickly realized, the first being the one that was most crowded; the list of kids who had been taken away from the school safe, who had been confirmed as being brought into this gymnasium, who had been uninjured, now only waiting to be retrieved by their parents.

The crowd thinned out dramatically as Brittney's eyes scanned down the row towards the second section of names, the kids who have been confirmed injured, the kids who have already been taken to Lima Memorial Hospital for treatment… Crowding the lists were parents whose faces have grown so pale that you could practically see through their skin, their eyes sunk inwards, their hands shaking as they dragged their fingers across the list in search of the appropriate name…

That particular cluster of people, Brittney couldn't help but think, was a dead end for all hope; either way, it was lose-lose… If your child was on the list, they were injured to an extent that nobody could be certain of, if they weren't on the list, they were probably dead…

There was no list indicative of the kids that have since been confirmed dead, but Brittney wondered if that was a more private entity… She was morbidly curious; she wondered how many people had been killed at the hands of Jacob and Suzy today, if there had been more than the impossible amount that she had watched fall within the bloodbath that had become of their cafeteria…

Probably, she can't help but think.

There was a relatively large crowd of parents standing on their own accord, and unlike the others, they stood so still and so silent that they gave off the impression that they weren't so much as breathing… These were the parents that had not found their child's name, nor heard from them anywhere… they were the ones left to fear the worse, ones who were left to imagine the horrors that came alongside the idea that either their child was dead, or else still trapped inside of the abysmal death trap that had become of their school…

She wondered how many people remained still unaccounted for, wondered how many people were still inside of that school… there were an awful amount of parents standing there, Brittney couldn't' help but notice, she couldn't seem to count them fast enough…

Her mind began to wonder; suddenly, she was wondering how much even the police knew… they hadn't had an opportunity to approach the school's interior yet, Jacob and Suzy had still been shooting when she'd left… she wondered if it was all over, she wondered how many more questions she could fit into her skull before it positively exploded…

Had emergency officials managed to gather enough evidence to be able to inform the nervously awaiting parents of David Karofsky that their son's head had been blown off at the hands of Jacob Ben-Israel only after Jacob had tormented him for several minutes… Did they know that Mercedes was dead, that Matt had been killed simply so that Jacob could make a point, that Quinn had stood up to death nobly, that Puck had sacrificed himself trying to save her…?

Did they know that she had practically had to be pried from Santana's body?

"Mrs. Lopez?" As if on a perfect cue in an external confirmation of her inquiry, she hears a police officer calling for the woman amidst the crowd that she hadn't even noticed in her first initial sweep… Her pulse surges with an exceptional force that has her still-bleeding hand throbbing with a particularly sharp pain, forcing her to revert back to the wound that she'd somehow managed to forget about all together…

She ignores the impossible agony radiating up her arm and stands herself onto her tip-toes in an effort to catch a glimpse of Santana's mother who she spots just as the older woman is pulled to the side by a police officer with a clipboard held tightly between his hands…

Brittney doesn't need to see the board to know that this is the list of kids who have since been confirmed dead, and all at once all of her questions have been answered; they did know.

Brittney has never noticed just how short Santana's mother was before, but suddenly, she seemed impossibly small as she shuffles slowly towards the officer who lifts a gentle hand of comfort and places it firmly against her shoulder as he begins to speak…

She couldn't hear what he had to say but she didn't have to… As if she were watching a silent movie, she watches as Mrs. Lopez collapses to the ground below her, the officer that had been left the duty of delivering the bad news unable to do anything but watch the grieving mother as her wails of pure agony render the chaotic gym silent…

Observers back away gently although their eyes are glued to the grieving mother before them so that they quickly find themselves forming a large circle around the woman, giving her as much privacy as was humanly possible to mourn the loss of her daughter inside of an impossibly packed gymnasium…

And all that Brittney can do is watch as slowly, one by one, heads begin to bow, lips begin to race, muttering in quiet prayer to enact some hope along to the rest, who had lost so much in the blink of an eye.


End file.
